US Election Breaks BookTok Apart

TikTok creator @lizabookrecs had a question: When did BookTok become political? It was hours after Donald Trump won the US presidential election and the bookish subset of TikTok was already starting to crack. People began unfollowing their fellow BookTokkers whose views did not align with theirs—many of whom had expressed support for Trump—and a heated debate grew about whether or not the site was political. In her letter, @lizabookrecs said, “We don’t need politics to ruin the good thing we’re doing.”

By the following Monday, it seemed that the collapse of BookTok had happened.

Do-not-follow lists, sometimes called “red lists,” began to proliferate. In response, some creators posted that they were starting to follow redlisted creators as a show of support. The creators asked Trump supporters to get lost. For every person who says 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 of the best books have some perspective on social issues. “You voted for tomorrow,” said TikTok user @_onesteph, holding a copy of Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale.

Several people have stitched @lizabookrecs’ video, which has over 100,000 views so far and echoes the sentiments of several TikTok users, to respond. Romance writer J. J. McAvoy likened the post to violence: “When someone tells you, ‘This space is not for you’ or whatever it is, they are trying to shut you up so they can continue to pretend everything is fine with them.” “

This week since Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, these types of arguments have been popping up in all kinds of online communities. Often, the arguments come to the same conclusion: If this is a corner of the Internet dedicated to one type of discussion, why can people now use it to talk about politics? A good question, but one that implies that politics does not affect almost every aspect of people’s lives and interests. Car enthusiasts can end up talking about Elon Musk and Tesla, or manufacturing overseas, or the merits of EVs. Space enthusiasts can easily find them, in the discussion about Elon Musk and SpaceX, or the privatization of space flight.

Books are similar—and different. Although, yes, such books The Handmaid’s Tale or Atlas Shrugged or The Hunger Games series dealing with real political issues through fiction and fantasy, many books are also the subject of political persecution of some kind. According to the American Library Association, there were 414 attempts to check out books in public, school, and academic libraries in the US between January 1 and August 31 of this year. That number is down slightly from the 695 attempts made at the same time last year—which saw most of the attention focused on books by or about people of color or the LGBTQ+ community—but still far outpaces the numbers for years before 2020. Efforts across the country seek to remove non-standard textbooks from schools, and PEN America found that there were 10,046 cases of textbook bans between 2023-2024. school year. That ban often occurs, according to PEN, when the guidance of teachers and librarians is “overruled by school boards, administrators, or even politicians because of the book’s content.”