Librarians, contrary to their traditional image, are powerful social agents. Whether in public or university and college libraries, the collections they build to serve readers and researchers also curate today's readers and their research.
Librarians hold significant power because what they include or exclude from library collections shapes minds, which is why diversity of subject matter is vital. We are currently in the middle of Freedom To Read Week, and how freely people choose what to read depends largely on what they find on library shelves. Librarians must use their power to get beyond merely promoting what's already popular -- the ideological flavour of the moment which the fashionable influencers chatter about on social media.
Bookstores are in the business of providing what sells (a best seller is a book that sells because it sells best). Stores promote fashionable authors with large displays, and libraries do this too with "Fast Read" options (short borrowing periods that create fast turnaround) and face-out display on the Hot Releases shelves.
These books become hot because they're displayed and promoted, a self-fulfilling process which shapes public opinion about "good books".
It's up to the individual reader to go deeper into both the collection catalogue and the stacks behind the display shelves. If all the books on a particular topic, especially from earlier periods, seem suddenly to have gone missing, readers need to query the librarians about it.
Libraries cull book and periodical collections as well as build them, just like opinion-makers "cull" attitudes which the cancel-culturati deem inappropriate. There are plenty of library patrons (and non-patrons) who object to particular authors and subjects in these days of raging identity-bias. It's up to broad-minded readers and librarians together to resist these incursions on our shared freedom to read.
(Of further interest: https://cfe.torontomu.ca/page/cfla-and-cfe-work-together-library-challenges-database )
See also: https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2022/11/on-scroll.html
and: https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2023/02/trigger-warning.html
