Elizabeth Gilbert's upcoming novel , Snow Forest, received a barrage of over 500 one-star reviews because it was set in Russia . As a result, the internationally bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love announced on Monday that she is  pulling the book  from its planned publication schedule. The book was slotted for publication in February 2024, but now there is no release date. 

It's common these days for authors to face accusations that their latest book is causing (or will cause) pain to a marginalized group and for them to pull the story based on that. In her Monday video, Gilbert described "responses from my Ukrainian readers expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain" over the story and said she was putting publication on hold as a result.

In so doing, she's following in the well-worn footsteps of recent writers. When Amelie Wen Zhao's debut novel, Blood Heir, was accused of "anti-blackness," she issued an apology and asked her publisher not to publish it . However, there's reason to doubt that the people professing pain at a book's hands are being sincere.

This is especially easy to see with Snow Forest. The argument is that Gilbert is "romanticizing" Russia, which endangers Ukraine in its war. But this connection seems tenuous. For one thing, Snow Forest  paints the Russian government as the villain; Gilbert  notes  that the characters "remove themselves from society to resist the Soviet government and try to defend nature against industrialization."

For another, writing a book that humanizes Russian citizens hardly amounts to taking sides in a war. It's not as though Putin is a democratically elected leader; he's long been accused of  rigging elections , and he's  jailed opposing politicians or banned them from running against him. Blaming Russian civilians for the actions of Putin is like blaming German civilians in the 1940s for the Holocaust; once Hitler seized power, peaceful dissent was not exactly an option. 

More broadly, there's reason to suspect that these cancellation attempts  are motivated less by a genuine concern for helping marginalized groups than by a desire to see someone else (in this case, Gilbert) in pain. A preprint paper titled "Doing Good or Feeling Good? Justice Concerns Predict Online Shaming Via Deservingness and Schadenfreude" by a team of social psychologists analyzes whether online pile-ons are motivated more by social justice concerns or by schadenfreude. The authors ran a series of three studies in which participants were given the option to engage in "online shaming" of the type that Gilbert and Zhao experienced.

The authors note that a concern for helping marginalized folks was not a primary motivator: "Participants’ concerns about social justice were not directly positively associated with online shaming and had few consistent indirect effects on shaming via moral outrage." Instead of social justice, the biggest motivation seems to have been schadenfreude: "Our results suggest that people may also need to experience a sense of malicious pleasure at a transgressor’s suffering in order to act." 

Or as noted psychologist and professor Jonathan Shedler  sums it up : "This study suggests that people who publicly shame & dogpile on social media are not motivated by moral outrage or a desire to do good, but by sadism." 

Indeed, the Goodreads commenters fit this analysis. Representative comments  argue that  "there is nothing interesting in [Russians], nothing human" and that Russians have "no soul." They are "pure evil" that "cannot be civilized." The war of aggression that Russia's government has launched against Ukraine is certainly awful, but the response shouldn't be to dehumanize an entire people. That's not justice; it's just malice.

It's common for authors to assume that these online mobs are motivated by social justice concerns, which might explain why so many authors cave to them. After all, most writers want to ensure they aren't writing books that cause more pain to marginalized groups. And to be clear, some cancelers are probably motivated by a sincere (if ill-considered) desire to make the world a more just place. But when an online mob just wants to watch the world burn, we should stop giving in to them.

Julian Adorney is a writer and marketing consultant with fee.org and has previously written for National Review, the Federalist, and other outlets.