Goodreads Won’t Let You Say Bad Things About JD Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’

Goodreads has temporarily disabled standing and reviewing Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir of enactment Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance. As first reported by 404 Media, users who effort are met with a popup letting them cognize they can’t. “This publication has impermanent limitations connected submitting ratings and reviews,” the popup says. “This whitethorn beryllium due to the fact that we’ve detected antithetic behaviour that doesn’t travel our reappraisal guidelines.”

Reached by phone, Goodreads pointed Gizmodo to the popup connected its website and declined to remark further connected the matter.

A inferior Senator from Ohio, Vance’s database of bizarre and atrocious takes is long. He’s said that the U.S. needs a “de-Ba’athification” program, argued that daylight savings clip hurts women’s fertility, and earnestly shared his sentiment that Star Wars: The Last Jedi was a “cruel movie.”

But earlier each that helium was selling retired his “hillbilly” household successful Appalachia successful a bestselling 2016 memoir. The publication details Vance’s aboriginal life, his mother’s conflict with cause addiction, and his high-falutin opinions connected the achromatic agrarian mediocre helium claimed arsenic his own. The publication was a smash hit. People successful Appalachia hated it. Netflix turned it into a movie starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams that critics hated.

People often explicit their displeasure astatine artists and writers connected online reappraisal platforms. Sites that let idiosyncratic ratings (like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and Steam) look a occupation wherever users permission antagonistic reviews of a portion of creation due to the fact that they’re huffy astatine the creators oregon tied up successful immoderate bizarre civilization warfare nonsense. It’s called reappraisal bombing, and it happens each the time.

Goodreads has been astatine the halfway of galore reappraisal bombing controversies implicit the years. No 1 is much vicious to each different online than young big publication fans. To combat reappraisal bombing, Goodreads launched a strategy successful October of 2023 that temporarily halts idiosyncratic reviews erstwhile it detects reappraisal posts that it believes interruption its guidelines.

Goodreads announced the caller system successful a blog station past year. Hillbilly Elegy is not the archetypal clip it’s been deployed. In December, it had constricted reviews connected the publication Israel by Noa Tishby. In March, it did the same for the publication To Gaze Upon Wick Gods by Molly X Chang.

Users connected Amazon, which owns Goodreads, are not facing a akin restriction. The caller reviews of Hillbilly Elegy on Amazon are afloat of 1 and 5-star reviews.

“This publication is overmuch similar the antheral who wrote it- garbage,” said a one-star reappraisal posted connected July 16. “It is inflammatory towards upland people, truthful harsh and captious and lacks immoderate basal knowing of station concern illness successful a portion that is rife with governmental oppression and deficiency of representation, basal infrastructure, and planetary corporations arsenic absentee landowners that wage small to nary taxes to enactment the section assemblage base. Mix this with the scenery and of people you person a resilient radical of radical worn down to judge their batch successful beingness with small ways to alteration their reality.”

For anyone looking to recognize the humanities and economical pressures that shaped Appalachia, whitethorn I suggest Night Comes to the Cumberlands?