TikTok creator @lizabookrecs There’s a question: When did BookTok become political? It was in the later hours Donald Trump won the US presidential election and subset of TikTok love to talk about literature has begun to crack. People have begun unfollowing fellow BookTokkers whose views don’t align with their own—mostly those who expressed support for Trump—and a heated debate is growing about whether this space is a political space or not. In her article, @lizabookrecs declared“We don’t need politics to ruin the good things we have.”
By the following Monday, it appeared that BookTok’s demise had occurred.
Unfollow lists, sometimes called red lists, began to circulate. In response, some people got creative posted that they are starting to track red-listed creators as show support. Creator request Trump supporters are lost. For every person who argues that an online community built around discussing books shouldn’t be a community for discussing politics, there’s another who points out that most works of literature great people all have at least some perspective on social issues. “You voted for this future,” said TikTok user @_onesteph saidholding up a copy of Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale.
Some people parlayed @lizabookrecs’ video, which has more than 100,000 views to date and reflects the sentiments of some TikTok users, in response. Romance novelist JJ McAvoy likened the article to violence: “When someone tells you, ‘This space is not for’ whatever it is, they are just trying to shut you up so they can continue to pretend that everything is okay for them. “
In the week since Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, these types of arguments have appeared in all sorts of online communities. Usually, debates come to the same end: If this is a corner of the Internet dedicated to one form of discussion, why are people now using it to talk about politics? A fair question, but it implies that politics touches almost every aspect of people’s lives and interests. Car enthusiasts can easily talk about Elon Musk And Teslaor overseas manufacturing, or the value of electric vehicles. Space enthusiasts can easily find themselves in a discussion about Elon Musk and SpaceXor privatizing spaceflight.
Books are similar and different. While, yes, books like The Handmaid’s Tale or Atlas shrugged or Hunger game The series deals with real political issues in fiction and fable, many of the books are also the subject of a kind of political repression. According to the American Library Association, there have been 414 attempts to censor books in public, school, and academic libraries in the United States from January 1 to August 31 of this year. That number is down slightly in comparison 695 attempts made during the same period in 2023—with more attention focused on books by or about people of color or the LGBTQ+ community—but still far exceeds the number in years before 2020. Nationwide efforts have found how to remove weird books from schools, and PEN America found that there were 10,046 book bans in the 2023–24 school year. Those bans often come, according to PENwhen the guidance of educators and librarians “is ignored by school boards, administrators, or even politicians based on the content of the book.”
