From Flowers to Fascism? The Cottagecore to Tradwife Pipeline on Tumblr

TL;DR

The paper investigates whether Cottagecore content on Tumblr can lead users to Tradwife content co-opted by white supremacist or far-right groups. It employs a mixed-methods design with a large-scale hashtag dataset (over 223,000 Cottagecore posts) and qualitative coding of overlap posts to assess overlap, explicit radicalization, and mainstreaming, including temporal analysis around 2021. Key findings show no evidence of explicit radicalization within Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag, but there is evidence of mainstreaming of far-right ideologies in overlapping content and a notable post-2021 shift toward religion, traditional gender roles, and homesteading. The study highlights moderation challenges due to non-explicit extremist content and suggests cross-platform, longitudinal, and recruitment-path analyses to further understand how extremist content may diffuse in adjacent online communities.

Abstract

In this work we collected and analyzed social media posts to investigate aesthetic-based radicalization where users searching for Cottagecore content may find Tradwife content co-opted by white supremacists, white nationalists, or other far-right extremist groups. Through quantitative analysis of over 200,000 Tumblr posts and qualitative coding of about 2,500 Tumblr posts, we did not find evidence of a explicit radicalization. We found that problematic Tradwife posts found in the literature may be confined to Tradwife-only spaces, while content in the Cottagecore tag generally did not warrant extra moderation. However, we did find evidence of a mainstreaming effect in the overlap between the Tradwife and Cottagecore communities. In our qualitative analysis there was more interaction between queer and Tradwife identities than expected based on the literature, and some Tradwives even explicitly included queer people and disavowed racism in the Tradwife community on Tumblr. This could be genuine, but more likely it was an example of extremists re-branding their content and following platform norms to spread ideologies that would otherwise be rejected by Tumblr users. Additionally, through temporal analysis we observed a change in the central tags used by Tradwives in the Cottagecore tag pre- and post- 2021. Initially these posts focused on aesthetics and hobbies like baking and gardening, but post-2021 the central tags focused more on religion, traditional gender roles, and homesteading, all markers of reactionary ideals.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Number of Cottagecore posts over time on Tumblr. This matches trends in the literature and shows that most posts were made after 2018.
• Figure 2: Number of Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag over time on Tumblr, split between Power User and all other users. This shows a spike of posts with Tradwife-related hashtags during 2021, mostly made by Power User.
• Figure 3: The proportion of Tradwife posts in the Cottagecore tag over time on Tumblr. Tradwife content was more prevalent (7 out of every 100 posts) during 2021, presumably due to Power User activity, and this continued into 2022. Otherwise there was about 1 Tradwife post per 100 posts in the Cottagecore tag.
• Figure 4: This Venn Diagram illustrates the population of interest. Here we collected posts with the tag #Cottagecore, which is the large white circle. The dark gray circle indicates Tradwife posts. The majority of our analysis concerned the light gray portion, or the overlap between these two communities, since we were interested in the Tradwife posts that one might find by searching for #Cottagecore.
• Figure 5: The tag-cooccurence network created from the overlap of Tradwife posts in the #Cottagecore tag pre-2021. We excluded Power User from this visualization. We trimmed the network to a manageable size ( 130 nodes) using weighted K-Core decomposition before visualization and used the Force Atlas layout with some adjustments to increase label visibility. The size of the node was mapped to degree and the nodes are colored according to how many times they were posted in the same post as #Cottagecore. Darker nodes were posted with #Cottagecore more often. Compared to the post-2022 visualization see a focus on aesthetic-related tags like #flowercore and #forestcore and hobbies like baking and gardening.