The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter

Many members of YA Book Twitter have become culture cops, monitoring their peers across multiple platforms for violations. The result is a jumble of dogpiling and dragging, subtweeting and screenshotting, vote-brigading and flagging wars, with accusations of white supremacy on one side and charges of thought-policing moral authoritarianism on the other.

Reading this article, I'm reminded of a quote by Emmanuel Levinas: “All generous thought is threatened by its own Stalinism.”

As a culture, we really need to figure out how to have passionate disagreements without throwing each other into gulags. In academia, your conversation is part of a larger discourse with your peers. In an ideal world, your writing invites dissenting responses, which you are then expected to respond to with further discourse. Online, all too often, dissenting discourse turns leads immediately to toxic call-outs, doxxing, and threats.


The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter by Kat Rosenfield