BookTok is the only profitable publishing trend of the year. How much of the profit goes to BookTokers?
Walk into a Barnes & Noble these days, and you’ll see a peculiar sight. Instead of Barnes & Noble branding everywhere, there’s BookTok branding everywhere.
Tables of books emblazoned with BookTok signs, pushing the books that are popularly recommended on TikTok’s reading community. A little reading journal for sale titled BookTok Made Me Read It. A special display just for Colleen Hoover, who went from indie romance author to queen of the bestseller list after blowing up on BookTok. There’s a little sign over her name that says “BookTok.”
Loosely speaking, BookTok is a community of people on TikTok who focus all their content on books. They pan their cameras across shelves of beautiful hardcovers, analyze the tropes of their favorite genres, recommend their favorite books, record themselves throwing their favorite books across the room in a fury of emotional overwhelm. The stereotype is that BookTokers lean young and emotional, but as users are quick to point out, the community is huge. Search the #BookTok tag long enough, and you’re bound to find a BookToker who talks about books that appeal to you.
What all BookTokers have in common is that they are a hot commodity. Barnes & Noble is leaning so hard into the BookTok angle right now because, simply put, BookTok sells books. It’s one of the only things that does.
“It’s one of the strongest drivers that we’ve seen in the US market in the last couple of years. It is the only area of the market right now with very strong growth,” says Kristen McLean, the primary industry analyst for books at industry tracker Circana (formerly Nielsen). “When I look at the data, there’s no other area of the US publishing market that we can pin that’s seeing that level of year-over-year growth right now. That’s the third year of growth for these authors.”
During lockdown, as Americans with extra time on their hands began picking up books to keep themselves busy, the US book market grew at unprecedented rates. The post-vaccine market appears to have corrected itself. Before the pandemic, it was common for the US book market to grow at rates of 3 or 4 percent. From 2019 to 2021, it grew 21 percent. In the first three months of 2023, according to Circana, it has declined 1 percent — except for the authors whose books blew up on BookTok. So far this year, they’re seeing an increase of 43 percent over their 2022 sales figures.
In a market where it’s notoriously difficult for anyone to make a living, BookTok is helping a select few people make a whole lot of money. That state of affairs raises a surprisingly knotty question: How much of that cash is making its way back to the creators who made the videos that are generating all of these book sales in the first place? And how is it getting to them?
“I always want to be authentic.”
The main reason BookTok sells so many books, according to most of the BookTokers I talked to, is because it feels authentic and personal.
TikTok’s native format of short, punchy videos and culture of casual chattiness combine to create an atmosphere of intense intimacy between content creators and their audience. In the book world, that kind of intimacy and emotional connection is rare. All the caps-locked blog posts in the world can’t match the visceral force of a camera on a real person’s tearstained face as they sob over their favorite books — books that could easily become your favorites, too, if you want to buy them.
@aymansbooks this book ain’t for everyone, look up tw!#thesongofachilles #songofachilles #booktok
♬ original sound - Ayman
“We make books seem personal. It’s like talking to a friend,” says Nathan Shuherk, a 30-year-old with 133,000 followers. “I think there might be a bit of a parasocial relationship you develop with some of the creators. I hear quite consistently that people have purchased 20, 30 books that I have talked about, because they know I cover books they’re interested in.”
Accordingly, BookTokers treat their authenticity as a valuable asset.
“I always want to be authentic,” says Caitlin Jacobs, “to myself, my interests, and what my viewers would be interested in.” Jacobs, 25, was one of the earliest TikTokers to start using the #BookTok hashtag in 2019, a level of seniority that’s left her with over 300,000 followers. When she makes sponsored videos, Jacobs says, she makes it a priority to let her followers know that “this isn’t really that different from my regular stuff. This is a video I would make normally.”
“The whole process of choosing books to share on my platform: I take it seriously,” says Ayman, a student who preferred not to use her last name in this article. “At the end of the day, somebody is going to take that recommendation and then attach it to me. And hopefully they like the books that I recommend. So it’s important to me.” Ayman, 22, has close to a million TikTok followers.
Authenticity also features heavily into one of the issues that both Jacobs and Ayman cite as one of their big concerns about the platform: making sure that sponsorships opportunities for books about marginalized communities go to TikTokers from those communities.
“I think that’s really important when it comes to sponsorships,” says Jacobs, “that the community that’s represented in the book is able to be the ones who are paid to promote it.”
“I’d like to see, for example, Muslims promote Muslim books that are coming out, that publishers reached out to them for,” says Ayman. “This is their representation; they deserve it 10 times more. They can make it more authentic.”
This is the business model of the influencer economy: You forge a connection with your followers, and then you can use that to sell them stuff.
But there’s an inherent tension here. Once you monetize your own authenticity, how do you keep it authentic?
“This would be cool, to make money off this.”
BookTok exists within a larger creator economy where it’s normal for influencers to partner with the brands they produce content about. If you make videos reviewing different lipsticks, your go-to business model will be partnering with Revlon to talk about how great their lipstick is.
BookTok also exists within a rising social trend in which young people are encouraged to know their value and stop giving away their work for free. If someone wants to “pick your brain” for your professional expertise, charge them a consultation fee, admonish the advice posts online. If you’re interviewing for a new job, don’t do labor for free as part of the auditioning process. This ethos extends seamlessly into influencing as well: If your content is valuable, then you have a duty to yourself to monetize it.
Satoria Ray is a 26-year-old working at an educational nonprofit. Her books-centric TikTok account has close to 20,000 followers. “People want to get paid for their labor,” she says. “I feel like that’s a valid thing to do.”
Traditional book media is not set up to operate under this type of model. There, critics and reporters are paid by their outlet. A publisher wouldn’t offer money to a traditional book reporter, and a writer wouldn’t accept it if they did: It would be unethical.
The conversation becomes murkier when you consider these creators not as journalists, but as subcontractors, making and distributing content for a $50 billion company like TikTok. But TikTok, like many social media networks, tends to be miserly when it comes to paying the people who distribute their content on its platform. The current model is the TikTok Creator Fund. Users can join if they get 100,000 video views within a 30-day window, and they get cash based on what TikTok describes as “a combination of factors; including the number of views and the authenticity of those views, the level of engagement on the content, as well as making sure content is in line with our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service.”
“It’s like pennies,” says Ray.
Ray, however, is reluctant to do formal videos sponsored by a publisher on her TikTok. “I know that if I go to monetize my content, then I’m going to have to do more labor than I’m already doing,” she says. “I am reading the books that I want to read, and I’m promoting the books that I want to promote on BookTok. I would read them anyway if I wasn’t on BookTok. There’s no commitment, there’s no contract for me to even post about the books I’m reading if I don’t want to. As someone who works full time and is in grad school, it’s very difficult for me to think about what monetization would look like.”
For other BookTokers, monetization is a no-brainer. “It was always in the back of my head,” says Ayman. “Like, ‘This would be cool, to make money off this.’” Ayman is typically paid around $2,000 per video. While she works an internship, she says TikTok constitutes the majority of her income.
BookTok pays Jacobs enough to be her day job. She gets paid around $2,000 per video, going up to $4,000 if publishers want usage rights (the option to repost the video on their own platforms or use it as an ad). She’s used her downtime to write a fantasy novel that her agent is currently shopping around with publishers.
@caitsbooks #ad @Chloe Gong said #LastViolentCall is domestic fluff and I need it in my life! It’s available for preorder now from @Riveted by Simon Teen and will hit shelves on february 28th #SimonTeenPartner #SecretShanghai #AFoulThing #ThisFoulMurder #booktok #bookishvlog #theseviolentdelights
♬ Jazz masterpiece “As time goes by” covered by a Jazz violinist by profession(962408) - ricca
Both Ayman and Jacobs say they share Ray’s concerns about sponsorships pushing them to read books they otherwise wouldn’t. They are careful to only say yes to promoting books they would be interested in reading even if they weren’t getting paid for it. That doesn’t mean they always do end up reading those books.
“The thing for me is to never lie about a book and my opinions about a book. I always want to be authentic,” says Jacobs. “When I’m accepting a sponsorship, they will often give me talking points, and I will always make sure that I’m never being told to lie about it. If I haven’t read a book, then I will say I haven’t read it yet. But maybe I’m looking forward to it, or maybe I just heard about it and it was amazing, based on what I’ve heard.”
“They never ask me, ‘Give me a good review and I’ll pay you.’ It’s never like that,” says Ayman. “It’s more like, ‘Hey, here’s a book that’s coming out. I’m going to recommend it to my audience.’ I always disclose which posts are ads. It’s not like false advertising. I take it seriously.”
Zoe Jackson, a 24-year-old journalist, says that at 55,000 followers, she hasn’t yet reached the level where she could live off TikTok alone. Still, her videos did make her enough money last year that she had to report it on her taxes.
According to Jackson, publishers have a tendency to ask for too much and offer too little. One book company, she says, offered her $100 for a video whose rights they would control forever. “The contract was like, ‘We will own this forever,’” says Jackson. “Your face, your voice, your likeness, everything.”
Jackson considered signing before savvier friends advised her never to give away her likeness in perpetuity. “You could end up on the side of the bus, and they’d only have paid you $100 for that one video,” she says.
From friends who work as influencers in other fields, she has gathered that other companies pay much more for the same kind of ask. “I think a lot of BookTok folks are devaluing themselves a little bit,” she says.
“It’s been very tricky for marketers to fully co-opt it.”
Everyone I spoke to was hyper-aware of the problem of guarding their authenticity from the corrupting influence of money. Their strategies varied. As Jackson succinctly put it, “No one likes an influencer who takes money for books they don’t actually like.”
Shuherk says he’s been offered $2,000 to review a book on his channel, “but it came with heavy stipulations about what I was allowed to say and how I was allowed to not make criticisms of the book. I just felt uncomfortable,” he says. “I didn’t think it was something ethically I could support, and so I did not take it.”
Everyone I spoke to said they research their endorsements thoroughly, and make sure that even if they don’t have time to read the book in question, it’s at least something they would be interested in reading without a sponsorship. The biggest concern most of them expressed was accidentally endorsing something that might turn out to be problematic — a reasonable concern given that YA is one of TikTok’s most popular genres, and the YA community can sometimes have an expansive definition of what calling a book “problematic” entails.
“I always look at the book to make sure that it’s in line with what I would support,” says Jacobs. “I like to do a good amount of research to make sure that I know the history of the publisher, author, and book before I agree to promote it on my account.”
“I want to promote books that don’t stem from anything problematic, whether it’s all through the publisher or anything like that,” says Ayman. “I do plenty of research to make sure I’m not promoting the wrong thing.”
“I’ve seen some creators talk about not working with different types of places because of ethical concerns,” says Jackson. “I totally get that. I wouldn’t want to work with just anybody.”
Industry analyst McLean agrees that TikTok’s authenticity is part of what makes it so good at selling things. “At least early on, it was a very interactive, authentic exchange of ideas that wasn’t being messed with by marketers,” she says. She thinks that TikTok’s relative opacity as a platform means it’s likely to remain so for a while. “It does not have a native analytics platform built into it. It’s not like Google Trends where you can go and look up what people have been looking at. It is a black box, and that’s one of the keys to its sustained success: it’s been very tricky for marketers to fully co-opt it.”
That doesn’t mean marketers aren’t going to try. Publishing is an old and slow-to-evolve industry, and it has a tendency to clumsily cast every new technological innovation as either a savior or a demon. When I started working in publishing in 2010, the Kindle was going to be the death of the industry, the future of ebooks was popularly held to be book apps, and all the editors were being encouraged to acquire books from people who were popular on YouTube. Thirteen years later, the Kindle did not destroy publishing, the book app market has failed to materialize, and I don’t know of any book by a YouTuber that became a meaningful hit.
Currently, publishers see BookTok as their savior, all the moreso because they don’t really understand it. But publishing trends come and go.
There’s no guarantee that BookTok will stay this effective at selling books forever. Advertisers might finally crack it and make it lose its cool, or maybe Congress will ban TikTok in the US, or maybe TikTok will simply follow the pattern set by every social network before it and see its user base drift slowly and steadily away.
When that day comes, and all that Barnes & Noble BookTok merch gets thrown out and publishers find a new digital unicorn to chase, what will happen to the core community of readers left on TikTok? The ones who are still making videos and the ones still watching them? What will happen to the people who made enormous amounts of money for an industry that never quite knew what to make of them?
“Honestly, one of the main reasons we are good at getting people to buy books is the average person on BookTok isn’t getting paid to give their reviews,” says Ray. “There aren’t these big influencers with huge followings and all these brand deals and sponsorships flying all over the place. It’s usually a person in their car who just got out of work and is like, ‘I was reading this audiobook and I really enjoyed it.’ It’s moms who are cleaning the kitchen and just put the kids to bed and are like, ‘Hey, I just read this really cool book.’
“That’s unique to BookTok.”
Climate pessimism dooms us to a terrible future. Complacent optimism is no better.
We environmentalists spend our lives thinking about ways the world will end. There’s nowhere that I see doomer culture more vocal than on my home turf.
With leading activists like Roger Hallam, co-founder of the popular climate protest movement Extinction Rebellion, telling young people that they “face annihilation,” it’s no surprise so many of them feel terrified. In a large recent international survey on youth attitudes toward climate change, more than half said that “humanity is doomed” and three-quarters said the future is frightening. Young people have good reasons to worry about our ability to tackle climate change, but this level of despair should be alarming to anyone who cares about the well-being of future generations — which is, after all, what the climate movement is all about.
As the lead researcher for Our World in Data, an organization that aims to make data on the world’s biggest problems accessible and understandable, I’ve written extensively on the reasons to be optimistic about the future. The prices of solar and wind power, as well as of batteries for storing low-carbon energy, have all plunged. Global deforestation peaked decades ago and has been slowly declining. Sales of new gas and diesel cars are now falling. Coal is starting to die in many countries. Government commitments are getting closer to limiting global warming to 2°C. Deaths from natural disasters — despite what news about climate change-related fires and hurricanes might appear to suggest — are a fraction of what they used to be. The list goes on.
But here, I don’t want to talk about whether pessimism is accurate. I want to focus on whether it’s useful. People might defend doomsday scenarios as the wake-up call that society needs. If they’re exaggerated, so what? They might be the crucial catalyst that gets us to act on climate change.
Setting aside the moral problem of stretching the truth, this claim is wrong. Scaring people into action doesn’t work. That’s true not just for climate change, air pollution, and biodiversity loss, but for almost any issue we can think of. We need optimism to make progress — yet that alone isn’t enough. To contend with environmental crises and make life better for everyone, we need the right kind of optimists: those who recognize that the world will only improve if we fight for it.
A framework for bringing about societal change
To understand what sort of thinking does drive positive change, we can imagine a framework for how people conceptualize the future and their ability to shape it.
Credit where it’s due: I first saw a version of this concept in the venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One. He presented it in the context of entrepreneurship, but it tied perfectly with my experiences in the environmental space. I’ve adapted it.
My framework has two axes. On one axis, we have “level of optimism,” spanning from optimistic to pessimistic. People who think the future will be much better are on one end, and those who think it will be much worse are on the other.
On the other axis, we have “changeability.” This reflects how much people think the future can be shaped by the decisions we make today. People who think the world is changeable believe they have an agency to mold it, while those who think it’s unchangeable believe we’re on a predetermined path and that trying to shape the future is futile.
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Hannah Ritchie/Vox
This gives us four quadrants — but only one really matters for our purposes. The “optimistic and changeable” box is where people who move the world forward fall. We need more people in there. None of the other quadrants are effective. By exploring the characteristics of each person, we’ll see why.
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Hannah Ritchie/Vox
Pessimists doom most of humanity to a terrible future
Pessimists in the lower right-hand quadrant, those who think the future is not changeable, are the true doomers. Their position is that we’re screwed and there’s nothing we can do about it.
I used to be one. After completing several degrees in environmental science and following the climate movement closely for years, I became submerged by helplessness at the scale of the environmental problems we face. Despite it being my lifelong passion, I was ready to turn my back on the field and work on something else. The idea that I could do anything had been slowly beaten out of me.
Unchangeable pessimists have given up on agitating for change, and experience high levels of anxiety and despondency. But it’s important to realize that not all levels of anxiety are equal, or equally arresting. Research shows that some anxiety can be a strong predictor of positive, constructive action. It can be a signal that we’re unhappy with how things are and give us an initial trigger to act. But it’s useless unless combined with hope that things really can get better.
What unchangeable pessimists feel is paralyzing anxiety. That’s a horrible place to be in emotionally, but it’s also an ineffective one. It prevents people from actually going out and doing things to mitigate climate change.
There is a second flavor of pessimism: those in the lower left-hand quadrant of our framework, who are resigned to a doomed future but think that rather than do nothing, we must prepare for the inevitable.
This group is just as anxious as the unchangeable pessimists. But rather than being despondent, they become self-serving and indignant. They do all they can to protect themselves and whatever morsels of a livable planet are left.
Changeable pessimists promote extreme and divisive environmental solutions that are unrealistic and would leave many far worse off. Extinction Rebellion, for example, has called for the UK to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. It’s undeniable that the UK has to reduce its emissions rapidly, but many scientists agree that a 2025 deadline would be unworkable and damaging because we don’t have replacements ready to fill the energy gap.
An immediate boycott of fossil fuels would result in a humanitarian disaster because the world still overwhelmingly relies on them to meet everyday energy needs. This way of thinking doesn’t rationally weigh the costs and benefits of trying to radically reduce our resource use overnight. It represents a kind of self-preservation for people in affluent countries: Rather than looking outward to build international cooperation, it pushes countries and communities to look inward.
At its extreme, changeable pessimism is susceptible to the sort of ideas advanced by biologist Paul Ehrlich, who has been predicting environmental collapse due to human overpopulation for over half a century. It’s an approach that assumes — against our past experience — that it’s impossible for humans to overcome perceived environmental limits, and that we have to impose devastating austerity instead. It would sacrifice the well-being of some of the poorest people on the planet, who need both growth and energy. This is no way to solve global challenges. But it’s an inevitable outcome of a scarcity mindset.
Optimism is the only thing that works — but only if we don’t assume that progress is inevitable
Now we turn to the optimists.
The “unchangeable optimists,” those in the upper right-hand corner of our chart, are a dangerous group. They assume the world will continue to get better regardless of how hard we work to change it. They look at historical progress and believe it’ll just continue.
Complacency can get us into trouble. We should never think that our rapid progress in health care, energy, technology, and education over the past two centuries was natural or preordained. It has been an unprecedented boom, and it’s required deliberate action from people who were not happy with the status quo.
And today, we need to adapt and push in different directions than we have in the past. Yes, we’ve made amazing strides in human well-being, but we now have very large, very novel problems to tackle: environmental ones. Sticking with what got us here won’t solve those.
Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less, is a classic unchangeable optimist. He rightly argues that fossil fuels have transformed the lives of billions, and says we should, for now, continue to exploit them to improve more lives. But this fails to acknowledge the problems with fossil fuels — not only for the climate but for the millions of people who die from air pollution linked to fossil fuels every year. Epstein’s argument may have made sense in the past, when we did not have affordable, scalable alternative energy sources, but not now.
Fossil fuel boosters demonstrate perfectly why unchangeable optimists are so wrongheaded: They want to maintain a status quo that doesn’t serve us anymore. Their complacency only serves to slow the accelerated action needed to change our trajectory.
As a self-identified optimist, I’m always in danger of being boxed into this category. I fight hard to stop the label from sticking. I believe that if the arc of history bends toward justice, it’s because we’ve made a concerted effort to change its trajectory. The path we’re heading on is not okay — we need to redirect it.
This brings me to the changeable optimists. This is the group that thinks the future can be better but knows that a better future won’t happen on its own. The world has lots of optimist changemakers, even if they don’t identify as such. People engineering new solar panels, batteries, and electric cars are changeable optimists. So are scientists at organizations like the Good Food Institute experimenting with ways to make plant-based and cellular meats; entrepreneurs like Boyan Slat, whose organization the Ocean Cleanup is trying to pull plastic waste out of the ocean; and policymakers pushing for sustainable policies.
These people might not always put high odds on a better future — they may, in fact, think there’s only a slim chance of success. But the act of trying creates possibilities that no one knew about before, which build a concrete case for optimism. Several years ago, for example, most wouldn’t have predicted that renewable energy prices would drop so quickly and dramatically.
Changeable optimists don’t shy away from criticism of the status quo. In fact, they’re often its fiercest critics. People often mistake pessimism for critical thought and optimism for pollyannaism. In reality, progress is built by those who can look critically at a suite of solutions, discard the bad ones, and find and sharpen the gems that remain. Pessimists use criticism as a wall, while optimists use it as a guiding door.
How we can become more optimistic
Pessimism is hard to overcome precisely because it’s often served humans well. History rewarded those who could detect threats early and fixate on them. But while pessimism might be good for survival — and survival was virtually all humanity had on its mind for most of its history — it’s not good for the flourishing we could achieve in the future. At its best, pessimism helps us stay where we are. It doesn’t give us the agency and determination to build something better.
The world would be a much better place if we had more optimistic changemakers. But there are key habits of mind I’ve found that can engender precisely the brand of optimism we need.
Most importantly, optimists take a long-term view of human progress. Many people forget how bad the human past was. Until the last century, poverty was the default. Half of children died before puberty. Health care and education were nonexistent for virtually everyone. Even with respect to environmental health, our preindustrial history was not as rosy as one might assume. The air our ancestors breathed was polluted from burning wood and charcoal; evidence of damaged lung tissue has been found in Egyptian mummies and in the remains of 400,000-year-old hunter-gatherers. The only reason our aggregate planetary impact was low is that high child mortality kept the human population small. We hunted many of the largest mammals into extinction. To think that the world today is dismal is to ignore the misery of our past.
Even if you accept that we’ve made enormous progress from the past, you might look at the scale of the threats we face in the future and lose hope that progress will continue. But in thinking about today’s challenges, it’s crucial to look at change over time, not just snapshots in time. During any transition, changes can look small at first; it’s the pace of change that’s important. Renewable energy right now makes up just 29 percent of global electricity production, but this is changing quickly. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that almost all of the growth in electricity use in the next few years will come from renewables. Electric vehicles made up just under 10 percent of new car sales globally in 2021, but in 2020 it was 4 percent, and the year before that, it was 2.5. It won’t be long until EVs dominate the car market.
Focusing on change over time doesn’t make us optimistic by default. The early days of Covid-19 are a case in point: Many people underestimated the scale of the pandemic because they were looking at snapshots of reported cases and deaths. In early 2020, these were tiny. What they should have been focusing on was the rate at which these numbers were climbing, which told a much more worrying story. Looking at change over time doesn’t always paint a rosy picture, but it does help us see the world more clearly and understand what future we might be heading toward — and, in most respects, seeing the world more clearly means seeing it more positively.
Similarly, we need to look at the complete picture, not isolated individual metrics, to understand complex problems. Global carbon emissions are still rising, which is bad. But many of the underlying factors that determine emissions — like the growth of low-carbon energy and the emissions of wealthy countries — are changing quickly. We need to look at the inputs into the system, not just the output. We’ll soon reach a tipping point when these inputs cause emissions to peak and decline, according to the IEA.
Finally, we should probably stop constantly reading the news. I used to read the news obsessively, thinking this was how to be knowledgeable about the world. Every day I was hit with stories about the latest hurricane, flood, drought, or wildfire. The problem is that I didn’t actually know whether the impacts of these events were increasing or decreasing. I thought more people were dying from disasters than ever, but only because I mistook an increase in reporting and my own interest for an increase in the numbers.
When I looked at the long-term statistics, I realized my perception was upside-down. The news isn’t a reliable barometer for the overall state of the world. I’ve found that pessimists look at the news, while optimists look at the data.
We must avoid complacent optimism
I often worry that people confuse changeable optimism with its counterproductive, unchangeable counterpart. That’s just as ineffective as pessimism. To avoid falling into the complacency trap, we need to hold on to an edge of dissatisfaction. Yes, many trends have been moving in the right direction, but we shouldn’t pretend that this was the best we could do.
As my colleague Max Roser has put it: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.” All three statements are true. We can acknowledge the progress that we’ve made but remain dissatisfied that we haven’t made more. We’ve reduced global child mortality to below 4 percent, but 5 million children under age 5 still die every year, most of them from preventable conditions like malaria, measles, and diarrheal diseases.
We can learn from this long-term decline in childhood mortality to understand what does and doesn’t work. But we then need to turn those lessons into action in places where child mortality remains high, which won’t happen on its own.
We also need to be honest about the areas where things haven’t been going well. Human progress has come at the cost of the environment and the lives of tens of billions of non-human animals that we slaughter for food. That may have been a price worth paying in the past, but we shouldn’t — and don’t have to — accept it anymore. Technological progress can build sustainability that works for people, the planet, and the species we share it with.
This is a totally different trajectory from the past, and a track that complacent, unchangeable optimism won’t get us on. Optimistic but dissatisfied is the road to progress. Let’s make sure this coalition is as large and diverse as possible.
Hannah Ritchie is deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data, and a researcher at the University of Oxford.
Two activists were just acquitted for taking factory-farmed chickens worth $16.
On Friday, after nearly six hours of deliberation, two animal rights activists facing misdemeanor theft charges were acquitted by a California jury. The alleged crime — which the activists freely admitted to — involved taking two sick, slaughter-bound chickens from Foster Farms, one of the biggest poultry companies in the US. Prosecutors called it stealing, but the defendants, Alicia Santurio and Alexandra Paul, both members of the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), called it a rescue.
Santurio and Paul (the latter a former Baywatch actress and longtime social justice activist) had taken the chickens from a truck outside a Foster Farms slaughterhouse in Livingston, California, in September 2021. According to Foster Farms, the animals were each worth $8.16, though the defendants still faced up to six months in jail if convicted. But unlike most criminal defendants, Santurio and Paul welcomed the prosecution — they refused multiple plea deals, including one that came with no jail time and would’ve eventually cleared the charge from their records.
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Direct Action Everywhere
The chickens’ rescue followed a 2021 hidden-camera investigation (conducted by a separate DxE activist) at the same slaughterhouse, which drew attention to the appalling cruelty of poultry slaughter. When the birds — whom the activists named Ethan and Jax — were removed from the slaughter truck by Santurio and Paul, they were both severely ill and struggled to stand. (Many factory-farmed chickens have been bred to grow extremely big extremely fast, and by the time they reach slaughter weight at six weeks old, their legs often can’t support their weight.) Ethan died four days after the rescue, while Jax recovered after intensive veterinary care and now lives on a farm sanctuary.
The defense argued that they weren’t breaking the law because Ethan and Jax were in such terrible shape when they arrived at the slaughterhouse that they were unfit for the food supply, making them worthless to Foster Farms. Both birds had multiple illnesses, and a veterinarian testified for the defense that Ethan’s necropsy showed he had Enterococcus faecium, a multidrug-resistant bacterial infection that can infect and kill humans and which has been linked to the chicken industry.
The acquittal “is a statement in defense not just of these two women’s right to rescue animals, but the right of every living being to be protected from corporate abuse,” said Paul’s attorney, Wayne Hsiung, a co-founder of DxE who has been a defendant in two other rescue trials, outside the courthouse in Merced, California. “It should be a clarion call for animal-abusing corporations that if you are going to hurt animals, people will intervene and stop you, and they will be defended by our community and by American citizens.”
Since its founding a decade ago, DxE, a grassroots animal rights group, has been testing out this strategy, which it calls “open rescue”: activists walk into factory farms and slaughterhouses and simply remove animals suffering there, taking them to receive veterinary care and eventually to live out their lives peacefully on animal sanctuaries. The tactic serves an elegant double purpose, saving animal lives in the immediate term while intentionally provoking conflict with a legal system that treats living beings on farms as though they were inanimate property rather than sentient individuals.
Santurio and Paul’s victory comes after a historic trial last October, in which DxE activists were acquitted by a Utah jury after facing a decade in prison for rescuing two sick, dying piglets said to be worth $42 each from Smithfield Foods, America’s top pork producer. More and more of the group’s rescues are making their way to trial (two more cases are scheduled for this year), where activists often facing lengthy prison sentences attempt to convince juries that they have a “right to rescue.”
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Direct Action Everywhere
As a long-time reporter on factory farming and the animal movement, I’ve been obsessively covering these cases for more than a year, and until very recently, I thought winning them was near-impossible. I was wrong. Now — with progress for animals seemingly at an impasse as meat consumption continues to grow, plant-based meat remains a niche product, and the meat industry fights hard-won bans on its worst practices — I increasingly think these tactics are vital to the long fight to end factory farming in the US.
The theory behind open rescue
I’m almost congenitally pessimistic about our chances of making life better for nonhuman animals, because so little has worked so far. The number of animals slaughtered for food every year is enormous and rising, in the US and the world. Compared to the rapidly worsening situation for animals, the gains made by the animal movement feel vanishingly small. Animal welfare groups have, for example, convinced many corporations to raise egg-laying hens free from cages — an impressive achievement that took immense effort, but it’s such a small improvement over the status quo that I’m hesitant to call it a victory. We need, at the very least, to experiment with novel strategies alongside marginal welfare improvements in the meat industry.
What I like about open rescue, and the philosophy of direct action more broadly, is that it’s utopian: it enacts the ultimate outcome that activists want to achieve for farmed animals, which is freedom from exploitation and commodification. Direct action represents “the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free,” as the late anthropologist David Graeber put it (in a context very different from animal liberation). It’s about “creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature.”
By doing this, activists are refuting animals’ status as chattel, albeit indirectly. Animals’ property status makes it exceedingly hard to fight directly on their behalf in court, as seen in the unsuccessful recent lawsuit that attempted to establish personhood for Happy the elephant and free her from the Bronx Zoo.
If animals can’t stand in court, human activists can put their freedom on the line for them instead. “Because animals still don’t have legal standing, this is, in a roundabout way, the only way we can get their issues spoken about in a courtroom,” Jeremy Beckham, a former executive director of the Utah Animal Rights Coalition and an aide to DxE’s legal team for the Smithfield trial, told me via text. “Rescuers can advocate on their behalf in a public trial, and through the remarkable risk they take upon themselves, demonstrate the strength of their convictions and the urgency of the issue.”
A trial offers a chance for rescuers to tell the stories of the animals they saved, connecting the fathomless billions suffering in factory farming to individual animals with lives worth living. Santurio and Paul testified at their trial last week about Foster Farms not being held accountable for how it treats its animals, describing DxE’s investigation at the slaughterhouse where Ethan and Jax would have imminently been killed. The footage shows birds thrown to the concrete floor and left to die, piling up on top of one another. One discarded chicken has their head stuck under a fence and struggles to escape. Some birds jump from the conveyor belt to the floor and are thrown back against the slaughter shackles. They’re then hung and dragged through an electric bath meant to stun them, but some lift their heads above the water and are never stunned properly, so their necks are sliced while still conscious. Workers are visibly overwhelmed as the slaughter line moves extremely fast; according to a 2021 Foster Farms training manual obtained by DxE, they’re each expected to shackle 23.3 chickens per minute.
These revelations are consistent with a 2015 investigation into Foster Farms by the animal welfare group Mercy For Animals, which also found birds being scalded alive in boiling water at the defeathering stage, after missing the blade meant to slaughter them. (This has also been documented in federal inspection reports at Foster Farms). Responding to questions about these allegations, Ira Brill, the company’s vice president of communications, said in an email, “Foster Farms has no comment.” (Before the trial, a Foster Farms spokesperson told the New York Times that allegations of inhumane treatment “are without merit and a disservice to the thousands of Foster Farms team members that are dedicated to providing millions of families in the Western United States and beyond with a quality nutritious product.”)
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Direct Action Everywhere
“It doesn’t matter where I go, what year I go — I’m always going to find horrific animal cruelty and neglect at Foster Farms,” Santurio testified last week, saying that she’s been inside five different Foster Farms facilities and sent legal complaints about the conditions to law enforcement. “We contacted animal control, the sheriff, the DA, the attorney general,” she told me in an interview. “No response.”
In light of this history, Paul told the jury, her motives were simple: “You feel like, who is going to do something, if not I? If not us?”
Direct rescue has proven it can work — and use of the tactic is growing
In late 2021, I was getting ready to cover the trial of Matt Johnson, another DxE activist who was facing prosecution in Iowa over a piglet rescue and an undercover investigation at Iowa Select Farms, the state’s largest pork producer. (His trial ultimately never happened; the charges were dropped at the very last minute.) I asked Justin Marceau, a professor who specializes in animal law at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, what implications it could have for animal rights if Johnson won his case.
His answer was clarifying: on one level, a victory wouldn’t necessarily mean anything because jury trials have no legal precedential value. One jury’s decision has no bearing on how another jury rules in a similar case. On another level, he said, an activist victory would mean everything, because prosecutors hate to lose trials and aim to pursue cases that they think they’ll win. If they sense hesitation among jurors to convict animal activists, they won’t want to pursue them anymore, which in turn creates new opportunities for activists to carry out more ambitious rescues. If activists lose a case, they can challenge it at the appellate level, where decisions do have precedential value. For example, defendants could appeal a judge’s decision to not allow them to show certain kinds of evidence (like conditions inside a factory farm) or use certain kinds of defenses, and an appeals court ruling then creates binding precedent that will influence what happens in future trials.
When I first talked to Marceau a year and a half ago, these seemed like remote, highly aspirational outcomes. Then DxE won the Smithfield trial in Utah, and the canvas for animal advocacy suddenly expanded. DxE’s theory — that when you show a jury of ordinary citizens what happens to animals in the meat industry, they’ll agree that they deserve rescue — turned out to be true, challenging the idea that the animal rights agenda is radical or unpopular.
The open rescue strategy is now gaining attention from legal experts — a notable change from the last decade-plus, when animal advocates shied away from such risky tactics, shaken by high-profile criminal convictions of activists in the 2000s. Last fall, the University of Denver started the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, a law clinic devoted to representing activists facing prosecution; one of its attorneys, Chris Carraway, represented Alicia Santurio in the Foster Farms trial last week. At the project’s launch in October, Marceau spoke about the remarkable legal achievement of the Smithfield trial. It showed for the first time that sometimes it can be legal to take animals from factory farms without the consent of their owners, opening up radically different possibilities for animal law, he said. (Disclosure: University of Denver’s animal law program, where Marceau is faculty director, gave me a journalism award at this event.)
There were, to be sure, important limits to that victory. The verdict depended in large part on DxE being able to prove that the two piglets it rescued were so ill that they wouldn’t have survived much longer in Smithfield’s care, thereby making them worthless to the company in monetary terms. That was crucial to the acquittal because to meet the threshold for theft, the alleged stolen property needs to have value.
A similar argument was central to the recent California trial. Many factory farms throw away sick animals who won’t make it to slaughter weight, which is an industry vulnerability activists can exploit in open rescue trials. But the flipside is that this ties whether or not an animal can be legally rescued to whether they can make money for the meat industry. A key challenge in future litigation will be to devise legal arguments that truly transcend animals’ property status.
Open rescue cases put factory farming on trial
One way of doing that is to try to introduce a “necessity defense,” in which a criminal defendant argues their actions were necessary to prevent a greater harm, like smashing a window in a locked car to save an overheated dog inside. The judge in the Utah Smithfield trial didn’t allow the defendants to use a necessity defense, nor did the judge in last week’s trial, Merced Superior Court Judge Paul Lo, who said that such a defense could only be used to save humans.
But whatever limitations are put on defendants in rescue cases — and especially in the Utah trial, activists’ ability to show the jury factory farm conditions was greatly limited — their message has, so far, come through. Watching the Merced trial last week, I was moved to see the lives of animals that society treats as disposable deliberated at length in a courtroom. Santurio and Paul appeared knowledgeable, convincing, and morally credible to my eyes. Veterinary and animal care experts testified on the deplorable conditions chickens are raised in. A Foster Farms executive was questioned about what the company does with animals who arrive at the slaughterhouse too sick to enter the food supply. A police officer said that allegations of animals scalded alive would be an important issue for his office to investigate. By the closing arguments, prosecutor Travis Colby was forced to concede that “the chicken business may not be a pleasant business.”
Judge Lo, at the end of the trial, told jurors that “this is not just about two chickens. It’s about very important principles.” This is, of course, why the factory farm industry sought to punish two activists for taking property valued at less than $20. As activists bring more cases, the risk of harsh industry, law enforcement, and political backlash increases. The FBI, which has historically categorized animal and environmental activists as terrorists, has already investigated DxE for multiple incidents and played a significant role in the Smithfield trial. In Utah, legislators swiftly passed an “anti-rescue” law after the Smithfield trial to prevent activists from using the same defense that helped DxE win.
But that everyday citizens are siding with DxE (some jurors have even spoken about how revelatory the experience was for them) is evidence enough that these fights are worthwhile — and they’ve made me more optimistic than I’ve ever been about the animal movement’s future.