THURSDAY THOUGHTS - WICT Goodreads and the Twitter Trump Trolls

GOODREADS

and the

TWITTER TRUMP TROLLS

Last week there was a "situation" on Twitter. A lot of bloggers have been referring to it as "Twitter drama", but I am not because it wasn't the usual mob scene of blogger on blogger, or bloggers on book/author with no one listening. Many bloggers said they were glad they, "... missed the drama," but this really wasn't "drama", it was a serious situation.

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It all started when author Laura Silverman posted a remark about Jimmy Fallon having Trump on his show.

A few hours later her Twitter feed blew up with antisemitic and misogynistic comments. Most of them had to do with concentration camp ovens. I wish I had grabbed some screen shots because the tweets are gone now (thank goodness). Twitter deleted the accounts for hate content. This is the only one that remained.

When someone went to add her book to their Goodreads tbr they found there were over 100 one and two star ratings on the book.

This book is still in copy edits. There are no ARCs. On further investigation most of the offending accounts were started that day and had only the one book listed. By the time I got over to Goodreads there were 285 one star ratings. I read some of the reviews and they were just as bad as the Twitter comments. There were also some anti-LGBTQ reviews because the Trump Trolls thought the mention of  "fish tacos" in the summary was code that the book was about lesbians.

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Again, most of the one and two star ratings are gone because we flagged them, but the ratings without reviews remain, 74 of them. I hope the trolls never figure out that a rating can't be removed without an accompanying text review. 

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However, just to show you what type of people are doing this, I did go to one account that had activity other than just Girl Out Of Water...

He has reviewed 625 books and his rating average is 1.35.

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He is also kind of scary...

I guess the right to murder quote and the bludgeoning quote are from his book? Then he likes his own quote. It is a little comforting to know no one else has liked them. And how is there an author on Goodreads named "Turd Sandwich"?

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Thank goodness the book community rallied around her and the other authors who were being harassed. We reported the hate content comments to Twitter, and flagged the racist, misogynistic, and bigoted reviews on Goodreads. This is why I wished so many of you hadn't missed the "drama" because it was so much more than "Twitter drama". There were two or three other authors targeted, but there was so much going on with just this one author my head was swimming much too much to get involved. If anyone knows who the other authors were, please tell me in the comments and I will add them to this post.

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I now know why most authors use really off beat names for Trump on Twitter. It is because the trolls search his name, and other commonly known "nicknames" he has been given by liberals, to look for targets.

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This also brings being able to rate and review books on Goodreads before they are available into the spotlight. You all know that I already hate this option. People say there is nothing that can be done about it because of ARCs, but there has to be some way to issue a code, which can be put in like a password, with an ARC. You would need the code to rate and review on Goodreads until the publishing date. I think it would work pretty well.