By CT Jones
December 18, 2024
BookTok, TikTok’s book community, is a side of the video app that revels in the far reaches of what the reading world can offer. There’s a section for everyone: comedy, lit-fit, science fiction, celebrity memoir, body horror, smutty fantasy, sports romances, and even sexy stories about women falling in lust with inanimate objects or anthropomorphic creatures. But following the results of the 2024 presidential election, one of the trending topics on BookTok wasn’t a discussion of a new release, but Donald Trump’s win over Vice President Kamala Harris — and how its presence in every corner of the community is making people pick sides some weren’t aware existed in the first place.
Since early 2020, when BookTok began to rapidly impact publishing, content created by online readers has often delved, at least tangentially, into politics. One of BookTok’s early hits, Casey McQuiston’s Red White & Royal Blue, was heralded by BookTok creators for the escapist and left-wing politics it romanticized during the first Trump administration. Later hits, like Song of Achilles or The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, often focused on queer or sex-positive storylines. But following Trump’s latest victory, several BookTok creators have made specific videos both espousing their disappointment in Trump’s win and recommending works for those who supported Harris. Now, a small but vocal cohort of BookTokers say that it’s time for the online group to do a reset — one that keeps politics far, far away.
Much of the argument seems to be in response to BookTokers encouraging Trump supporters and readers to unfollow them, to the ire of many MAGA-supporting accounts. Others in the anti-politics crowd noted that they read primarily fiction and fantasy works that focus on romance rather than allegorical plots — arguing those works don’t involve politics and can be discussed among those that have differing political views. “Everything in my book is fictional. All of it. Fictional characters,” said one author with 20,000 followers. “So why are we bringing up the ugliness that is happening in the real world?”
BookTok creators who voted for Harris, or were strongly against Trump, began stitching these videos with their own rebuttals. “Reading is political. Books are political. Being literate is political,” replied Amanda, a creator with over 20,000 followers. “I know politics can be exhausting for some but for others, politics impacts their everyday life. It’s a privilege and honor to be literate and it should be a right.”
Some posted examples of popular fictional books with clear political allegories or messaging like The Lord of the Rings or The Hunger Games. Others took it a step further, creating unfollow documents that compiled lists of MAGA BookTokers and authors, which devolved into an indistinguishable list of authors with Republican vibes rather than those with explicit right-wing statements.
Andrea Phifer first got involved in BookTok in March 2023, when she started posting about dark fantasy and romance to her 40,000 followers. In 2024, she began to notice the election taking up a sizable amount of the discussion in BookTok videos, something she tells Rolling Stone felt like “unnecessary drama.”
“Everyone has their opinion and that’s the beauty of us living where we live,” Phifer says. “I come here to just talk about books, about fairy smut. Nothing crazy serious. We’re doing this to escape reality, not bring our reality into it.”
Phifer declined to say who she voted for but said she doesn’t feel like reading is inherently political, one of the main points brought up by BookTokers who either supported Harris or were strongly against Trump. “I feel like it could be, depending on what you’re reading,” she says. “Maybe if you’re into nonfiction. But I feel like this election has made it not okay for people to have opinions or people to say things without somebody judging them.”
For Jodi Picoult — the author of 29 books, including Mad Honey, Handle with Care, and My Sister’s Keeper — politics has always gone hand-in-hand with writing novels about moral quandaries and familial sagas. She tells Rolling Stone that she hasn’t been surprised with BookTok’s recent debate over politics, since it’s one she’s been dealing with in her comment section since before the 2020 election. “This is a discussion that’s taken place for years. After 2020, I started getting more emails [and comments] from people who said, ‘I read you to escape. I don’t want to hear your agenda. Stick to writing books, not politics.’ And I’ve always answered the same way,” Picoult says. “All art is political, including writing. I’ve been writing the same kinds of stories now for 30 years. Honestly, if you can read my books and think I haven’t been political, I don’t know which books you were reading, because my books are all extremely rooted in questions of morality and issues that follow the political spectrum. And I think that if you believe that books should not be political, what you’re really saying is [that] books should not espouse a belief that you personally as a reader don’t have. That is a very different thing.”
Picoult and Phifer’s views represent two major sides of BookTok’s argument surrounding politics. But if this debate sounds familiar, it’s because it’s just a repackaging of one of the community’s longest-running arguments. Since BookTok became a driving force in the publishing industry, one of the most-referenced debates has been over anti-intellectualism — a hostility or general pushback against theorizing, philosophizing, or celebrating a level of intelligence. Are books for escape or knowledge? Can a book be fun and poorly written? Can a book’s quality ever actually be objective? If the biggest creators on BookTok continue to make the most wide-reaching and sometimes poorly written books rise to the top, while not only pushing away nonfiction, classics, or deeper reads, but actively calling them useless, or in some cases, elitist — can that still be considered a community that celebrates all kinds of readers?
Raghad Alshahomi, a 22-year-old BookTok creator, tells Rolling Stone that these questions continue to shape the content people see — sometimes to a fault. “I’m Arab and Muslim. Unless you’re a part of a very specific demographic — which is from what I’ve seen, cis white women — you’ve kind of always associated politics with reading,” Alshahomi says. “But I think people have been trying not to be political because people tend to immediately label you as pretentious. And in a community where it’s supposed to be loving and open arms, safe space for everyone, [that’s] the worst thing that you could get labeled [as]. So everyone’s kind of been avoiding this conversation, or even trying to baby people into reading diversely or engaging more critically.”
What Alshahomi is pointing to is TikTok’s prioritization of vibe curation over meaningful change, something that has characterized BookTok since its inception. The online groups that make up BookTok are called a community because of the grassroots nature of their influence, but it’s something the book group has used to its advantage in marketing, internal growth, and self-policing. Many arguments or discussions are often shut down simply because they’re considered unkind, judgy, or not in the undefined spirit of BookTok. “Look, I am a 58-year-old woman. I should not even have a TikTok account, but the reason I did it was because BookTok became a place where real, organic reader reviews were driving sales,” Picoult tells Rolling Stone. “I thought that’s a really interesting community and I’d like to connect with them.”
This public perception of a loving community is also why even as authors have continued to join to try and promote their own works, BookTok has remained a primarily reader-centric place. Sure authors can interact, but it’s the readers who decide the next big thing or next big target. This means that curating an aesthetic and vibe as a reader has become more important to building an audience than the literally nitty gritty of your reading list. Telling your followers exactly why you’re disappointed in Trump voters goes directly against this idea — and it’s probably why so many Trump supporters felt so shocked to see the unfollow trains in the first place. BookTok was supposed to be a big happy family, one full of girl power and togetherness. So where does it go from here?
None of the authors or readers who spoke to Rolling Stone believe that the new year and incoming political administration will lessen BookTok’s debate over the place of politics. But left-wing readers on the app have maintained that the ongoing debate has only incentivized them to be even more explicit about reading interaction with politics and power — and its impact on the real world. Alshahomi notes this is especially important as incoming Republican lawmakers have said they will continue to support book bans in multiple states. And for writers like Picoult, who have already baked their beliefs directly into their work, the next step is something she’s been doing since the very beginning — writing what she believes.
“I can’t think of any book set anywhere, not even a fantasy, honestly, that doesn’t have something to say. In fact, fantasies and romances are some of the most political books out there, and they’re technically not reality,” Picoult says. “It’s almost a facetious conversation because we all know art is political. That’s not the question. The question is, why are some people refusing to accept that?”
