According to a report, legions of Trump supporting trolls are unsatisfied with rigging online polls in their candidate’s favor and sending Hitler-emulating tweets at Clinton supporters. Nope, they’re also tanking Goodreads ratings for a YA author named Laura Silverman, who “heard from a fellow author that Girl Out of Water had been besieged with one-star ratings and reviews on Goodreads, a popular site where readers keep track of the books they’re reading,” writes Claire Fallon at The Huffington Post.
Ever since this summer, her tweets calling out presidential candidate Donald Trump for his problematic statements had attracted bucketloads of anti-Semitic responses and threats from white supremacist accounts. After she tweeted her anger about Trump’s cozy interview on Jimmy Fallon last week, the trolls multiplied ― and, apparently, spread to other forums. On Sept. 16, she tweeted a screenshot of her book’s newly abysmal Goodreads rating, with a plea to the site. “Please help. White supremacists are tanking my book,” she tweeted. “They’re trying to ruin my livelihood.”
While the site responded by deleting some of these comments, the whole episode is frightening, and reminiscent of what happened last year with Gamergate (which now feels like a prelude to this election).