Following the news that presidential candidate Donald Trump chose right-wing author J.D. Vance as his running mate, Goodreads has blocked users from reviewing Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy, after detecting “unusual behavior” from reviewers.
Clicking a star on the book’s page results in a popup that says “Rating this book is temporarily unavailable. This book has temporary limitations on submitting ratings and reviews. This may be because we've detected unusual behavior that doesn't follow our review guidelines."
“Review bombing” is the practice of negatively reviewing a product or service for reasons unrelated to the product itself; over the years, it’s affected everything from Marvel movies and travel companies to restaurants.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is the reason most people know who Vance is at all. In the book—a bestseller when it came out in 2016 and adapted by Netflix in 2020—Vance recounts his childhood in Kentucky’s Appalachia and subsequent escape from hardship to Yale. It’s been called “poverty porn” and reviewers have pointed out that it “bashes the entire region.”
Reviews on Goodreads have been busted for a long time, with both readers and authors reporting that the review system incentivizes bad behavior. In 2023, following a controversy surrounding the massive review-bombing campaign against author Elizabeth Gilbert, Goodreads issued a statement about how it moderates reviews. “Goodreads welcomes a wide variety of reviews—whether positive or negative—but prohibits reviews that are not relevant to the book, harass readers or authors, or attempt to artificially deflate or inflate the overall rating of the book,” the statement said.
Goodreads declined to comment on the record about disabling ratings for Hillbilly Elegy.
