Elena stared at the screen, the edges of her vision blurred from hours of reviewing flagged posts. Election season was a minefield. The guidelines were clear—remove misinformation, allow healthy debate—but reality wasn’t so simple.

She hovered over a post: “The election is rigged. Don’t even bother voting.” It was a lie, but not quite explicit enough to violate policy. She marked it for review. The system wouldn’t thank her for hesitating.

Her phone buzzed on the desk. A text from her brother, Adrian: “You’re coming to Mom’s for dinner, right?”

She sighed, fingers hovering over her response. Family dinners had become battlegrounds lately. Adrian was all in for one candidate; their father was rabidly for the other. Last time, their argument nearly ended with a broken plate.

Another post popped up on her queue, this one from a fake account spewing hate speech disguised as satire. It wasn’t hard to decide—she banned it and blocked the user. Easy.

But then came another: a blurry photo of a ballot, captioned: “Proof they’re tossing votes. Wake up, people!”

Her cursor wavered. The photo was doctored—she could tell immediately. But thousands had already seen it, and the comments were a firestorm. People believed it.

She flagged the post for escalation, her chest tightening. Every choice felt like a thread in a fraying rope, one more pull away from snapping.

At dinner that night, the tension was as thick as gravy. Adrian and their father avoided eye contact, speaking only in clipped sentences.

“Pass the salt,” Adrian muttered.

“Here,” their father replied curtly, shoving it across the table.

Elena stared at her plate, her appetite gone. She wanted to scream at them both: You’re all being manipulated. You don’t even see it. I see it every day.

Instead, she said, “I reviewed a post today about fake ballots. Hundreds of people believed it.”

Her father frowned. “So you deleted it? Censoring people again?”

“No,” Adrian cut in. “She’s stopping lies from spreading. Good for her.”

Elena slammed her fork down. “Do you two even hear yourselves? You’re both so convinced the other side is wrong, you can’t see what’s happening. They’re using us—all of us. While we fight, they win.”

The room fell silent, except for the hum of the fridge.

Later, Elena returned to her workstation. Another flagged post awaited her: “Divided, we fall.” It wasn’t flagged for misinformation. It wasn’t flagged at all.

For the first time all day, she smiled faintly and let it stay.