In early July, Daisy Buchanan was enjoying a sunny Saturday morning pottering around her home—then she reached for her phones. She opened Instagram and saw the words “review,” “mediocre,” and “irritating”; she immediately felt hot. “My body started to process it before my brain did,” Buchanan says. Tears sprang into her eyes. Buchanan, a 37-year-old author based in Kent, England, was reading a negative review of one of her books. But she hadn’t sought it out with an ill-advised name or title search—the reader had, in effect, sent it straight to her. They had tagged her in their post.

Around the same time, a few miles away in London, Lex Croucher was already having a bad day when their phones buzzed. It was a two-paragraph, one-star review of one of the 30-year-old’s books, and it essentially said there was “nothing to like” about Croucher’s work. In the past, both Buchanan and Croucher have placed pleas on social media: Say what you like about my work, but please, please, please don’t @ me when you do.

Readers and reviewers have never been more able to get their voices heard. The rise of Bookstagram and more recently BookTok have enabled bibliophiles to share recommendations, point out plot holes, and discuss fan theories on an unprecedented scale. Yet writers want you to know that it’s one thing to tell the world that you don’t like a book, and another thing entirely to tell its author.

Or is it? Is this not, after all, our brave new world? Sometimes writers need to hear the critiques of their work, especially if readers find it problematic. And shouldn’t authors suck it up and accept that tagging is part of the job—and actually, isn’t it really helpful to read constructive criticism? In that sense, isn’t tagging almost a kind thing to do? Buchanan, author of romance novels Insatiable and Careering, says absolutely not.

“I’m more than aware that there are valid criticisms to make of my work,” she says, “But at the moment I’m trying to write a book a year. I’m in the middle of a fairly painful third draft, so when I read an angry review of the book I finished two years ago, it really throws me creatively.” Though she says she’s “embarrassed” to admit it, Buchanan has now used various security and privacy settings to minimize how taggable she is on Instagram.

Anna James, 35-year-old London-based author of the children’s series Pages & Co, says tagged reviews can be bad for readers, too. “Whether a review is positive or negative, it really shuts down any conversation if an author is tagged,” she says, arguing that tagging takes the focus away from readers and places it on the author. “A conversation online about a book cannot be open and useful for readers if an author is observing it all,” she says. (She clarifies she means when readers are discussing reviews and ratings, not when trying to chat to an author about their work.)

James and Croucher both say the problem was exacerbated recently when Instagram began sending tagging notifications to users’ direct messages. “It really feels like a person trying to get in touch with you,” says Croucher, author of historical romances Reputation and Infamous. James says: “If I go looking for reviews, on Goodreads or anywhere else, it is on me to deal with the emotional impact of what I find, but when someone tags you, it is like someone coming to your house and shouting it through your letterbox.”

Buchanan, Croucher, and James all say that “reviews are for readers,” not authors—so what do the reviewers themselves think? Maya Topiwala is a 19-year-old Georgia-based BookToker with almost 16,000 followers. Topiwala argues that “author spaces and reviewer spaces are left separate for a reason, and social media has really blurred those lines.”

To avoid upsetting authors, Topiwala doesn’t tag them in negative reviews, but she notes misunderstandings can easily arise. For example, she recently reviewed a book and said she didn’t personally like it, but she added that there weren’t “any issues with the book itself”; she also pointed out things that other readers might like about the work. “I was surprised to see a lot of people in the comments took it as a negative review and were like, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to read it,’” Topiwala says. “If I’d tagged the author … it might have been so disheartening.”

Like books themselves, the words “negative review” are open for interpretation, and it’s possible that many reviewers don’t feel like they’re being harsh when they tag a three-star review that ends up ruining an author’s day. “Some newer viewers think that’s just how social media is,” Topiwala says of tagging. Croucher theorizes that “people sometimes forget that authors are people and treat them like big brands or corporations instead.”

James believes that “only a very small percentage” of negative taggers are genuinely trying to be malicious. “On the whole I think it’s probably a lack of awareness as to the impact it has,” she says, “just not thinking through what it might be like to be criticized out of the blue by a stranger online for something deeply personal that’s taken a long time to create.”

On BookTok, reviewers have now joined authors in pleading with readers not to tag negative reviews—there is a growing consensus that it’s Not The Done Thing. Perhaps, as more and more authors speak out, a very modern problem will quickly be relegated to the past. For Topiwala, BookTok is a positive place. While she does warn people about triggering content, poor representation, or books that she simply finds to be a waste of time, Topiwala’s main motivation for reviewing is simple. “I just want to get books into the hands of people who are going to love them,” she says.