tiktok creator @lizabookrecs I had a question: When did BookTok become political? It was in the hours after Donald Trump won the election for president of the United States, and the subset of TikTok that likes to talk about literature was already beginning to fracture. People had begun unfollowing other BookTokkers whose views didn’t align with theirs (mostly people who had expressed support for Trump) and a lively debate was growing over whether the space was political or not. In his publication, @lizabookrecs professed“We don’t need politics to ruin something good we have.”
By the following Monday, it seemed that BookTok’s collapse had already occurred.
Unfollow lists, sometimes called red lists, began to circulate. In response, some creators aware who were beginning to follow the creators of the red list as a show of support. Creators asked Trump supporters will be lost. For every person who claimed that an online community built around discussing books should not be a community for discussing politics, there was another person who pointed out that most great works of literature have at least some perspective on social issues. . “You voted for this future,” TikTok user @_onesteph saidholding a copy of Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale.
Some people stitched the @lizabookrecs video, which so far has over 100,000 views and echoed the sentiments of several TikTok users, to respond. Romantic novelist JJ McAvoy compared the publication to violence: “When someone tells you, ‘This space is not for’ whatever it is, they are just trying to silence you so they can continue pretending that everything is fine with them.”
In the week since Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, these kinds of arguments have been brewing in all kinds of online communities. Often, arguments end in the same final point: if this is a corner of the Internet dedicated to one form of discussion, why would people use it now to talk about politics? A fair question, but one that implies that politics does not touch almost every aspect of people’s lives and hobbies. Car enthusiasts could easily end up talking about Elon Musk and Tesla, or overseas manufacturing, or the merits of electric vehicles. Space enthusiasts could easily find themselves in a discussion about Elon Musk and SpaceX, or the privatization of spaceflight.
The books are the same and different. Although yes, books like The Handmaid’s Tale either Atlas shrugged. either the hunger games Although the series confront real political issues with fiction and allegory, many books are also the subject of some type of political persecution. According to the American Library Association, there were 414 attempts to censor books in US public, school and academic libraries between January 1 and August 31 of this year. That number is slightly less than the 695 attempts conducted in the same period in 2023, which focused much attention on books written by or about people of color or the LGBTQ+ community, but still far exceeds the numbers from years before 2020. National efforts have sought to eliminate queer books in schools. and PEN America found that there were 10,046 cases of book bans during the 2023-24 school year. These prohibitions usually come, according to the PENwhen the guidance of educators and librarians “is overridden by school boards, administrators, or even politicians based on the content of a book.”