BookBrowse Reviews Moderation by Elaine Castillo

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A content moderator for a virtual world must grapple with both personal trauma and corporate corruption.

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Girlie wouldn't say she likes her job, but she certainly doesn't hate it. As a moderator for social media site Reeden, she's part of a team tasked with determining which flagged posts need to be removed—which means she witnesses countless images of horrific assaults every day. It would be enough to make someone want to quit instantly, and in fact, over the years many of her coworkers have. But at this point, Girlie's grown numb to what she's seeing and has no plans to leave. The pay is enough for her portion of the mortgage on the Las Vegas house she shares with her extended family, and it's mostly mindless work. Although she's only in her thirties, she's already given up on any desire to climb the corporate ladder—until an unusual opportunity lands in her lap.

Reeden has recently acquired Playground, a gaming company that builds immersive VR worlds. They need moderators to enter the game and oust anyone caught misbehaving. Suddenly, Girlie is earning more money than she could have imagined—and potentially falling for the handsome director of moderation. But she soon learns that corporate politics can be every bit as seedy as what's going on in the game.

To avoid paying them benefits, Reeden contracts with Girlie and her low-paid content moderation colleagues through shell companies. Like Girlie, many moderators are first- or second-generation members of the Filipino diaspora. Girlie compares this work to the prominence of Filipinos in caregiving and service jobs: "The bootstraps way of putting it was to say they excelled, frankly, in the manner of people who had been formed to excel in these very specific theaters: because they spoke and read good English, because they respected chains of command, because they kept a positive attitude, because they would take a fifth of an American worker's pay." She is keenly aware of the structural racism at play and the way the company shows little care for its employees, providing "wellness" initiatives that are performative and get slowly clawed back. Prior to her entry into the gaming world, Girlie wryly notes that they don't provide the one thing that actually would meaningfully impact her well-being: a raise.

It's ironic that Girlie becomes a moderator for a VR world, because she already has the thing many people who play these sorts of games are seeking: community. To Girlie, however, her real-life network of a large extended family and their friends can often feel like a nuisance. Her relationship with her family is complex. An only child and the eldest of her cousins by several years, she feels a reluctant responsibility to care for them. We see this in play when it comes to her spending habits. Though her role at the beginning of the book is not highly paid, she has already bought her mother a Chanel bag and financed a Tesla for her, so her mother can brag to her friends about the wonderful daughter she raised. Girlie would also never dream of letting her younger cousins pay for a meal, though they are all employed and well into their twenties. Though she is a pragmatic and unsentimental person, she has a sense of familial duty that causes her to put herself last.

Girlie takes care of herself physically, eating well and lifting weights, but she neglects her mental health, suppressing her emotions rather than dealing with them. It's a trait that has served her well in her job, but has hindered her growth as a human. She has unprocessed trauma from losing her dad at a young age and being sexually assaulted by multiple adults in her life when she was a child. Her personal trauma is the one thing Girlie finds too frightening to face. She's wary of therapy, but her new job mandates the use of therapeutic VR (see Beyond the Book). Girlie finds the standard meditation modules unpleasant, as she's uncomfortable being still and alone with her thoughts. So she embarks on an unusual form of therapy—VR swimming lessons. She never learned to swim after a traumatic experience with a swim teacher as a young child. As we watch Girlie learn to swim, we see her gaining newfound emotional strength and finally prioritizing herself.

The novel's depiction of technology is multifaceted. VR enables Girlie to have the emotional breakthrough that therapy never could. By the end of the novel she is a changed person—still devoted to her family, but also ready to take charge of her own future. Yet in her work, Girlie sees the worst that the tech field has to offer, from the sort of corporate greed that enables the mistreatment of contract workers to the widespread sharing of vile, abusive material. Though the highly advanced VR tools in the book are speculative, the story is realistic in how it portrays emerging technology's potential to amplify both positive and negative experiences.

Moderation is a darkly humorous satire about a soulless tech company, but it still packs an emotional punch. Readers will be rooting for Girlie to get the happy ending she deserves.

This review first ran in the August 13, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.