Y.A. fiction, like many other areas of publishing, has a bit of a diversity problem, despite being a liberal-minded industry centered in New York City. But while the motivation behind the movement for more diverse voices is commendable, the manifestation of this impulse on social media has been nothing short of cannibalistic. The Twitter community surrounding the genre — one in which authors, editors, agents, adult readers, and reviewers outnumber youthful readers — has become a cesspool of toxicity. “Y.A. Twitter,” as it’s called, is a mess.

“Young adult books are being targeted in intense social media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons — sometimes before anybody’s even read them,” Kat Rosenfield wrote in Vulture in 2017. Y.A. Twitter features frequent over-the-top claims that various people in the community are “abusing” one another, with the term often used in a deeply watered-down sense.

“The scandals that loom so large on Twitter don’t necessarily interest consumers; instead, the tempest of these controversies remains confined to a handful of internet teapots where a few angry voices can seem thunderously loud,” Rosenfeld wrote. “Still, some publishing professionals imagine that the outrage will eventually become powerful enough to rattle the industry.”

The worriers were prescient. In 2019, books are not only getting excoriated by online critics who haven’t read them. They’re getting unpublished entirely.