As I write, it is deep into the “off season” of the literary world, and news outlets in most places are slumbering in a post-Christmas haze. But not me (in part the result of finally recovering from a long bout of flu). Amid the midwinter quiet, I have dug my way to a couple of interesting stories about the shape that social media might take for us in 2026.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
First up is the same story I think we started with in 2025: TikTok. Specifically, a year on, what the deal entails that means TikTok—and with it BookTok—will continue to be operational in the US, at least in the medium term.
TikTok’s US Future
2025 ended with an agreement from TikTok’s owners, ByteDance, to divest the US arm of its operations to a US-owned group, as reported by TechCrunch here and here. The highest-profile member of that group is the software giant Oracle. Other members of the consortium include private equity firm Silver Lake and investment firm MGX.
The key date for anyone in the US is January 22 of this year. That’s the date set, at present, for the deal to be finalized. As for the impact the deal will have, that’s twofold. First, TikTok, or something like it, will remain open for use, and with it all the niche communities such as BookTok.
Those who credit such platforms with introducing people to the joys of reading will breathe a sigh of relief. But it seems the transition won’t be seamless. Users are likely to lose access to the current app and need to download a new version.
Follower Counts Matter Less
The second story I came across fits rather well with this. It looks at the likely social media trends for 2026 and suggests that follower counts are less relevant than they have been previously. The reason is that algorithms now decide what gets shown to whom, without paying much attention to such counts.
The trend for the coming year will, it seems, be that “clipping” drives the most popular posts. Clipping is where—forgive me if I sound ancient and lose some of the nuance of reality—segments of longer posts by other users are taken and incorporated into a creator’s own work, as discussed in this TechCrunch piece here.
All of this means that for those of us looking to social media to find an audience for our work, 2026 is a year in which we are unlikely simply to be able to fall back on what has worked in the past—which feels as though it means more of our time will be spent on doing the part of our job that is not writing.
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