From Flowers to Fascism: The Cottagecore To Tradwife Pipeline on Tumblr

Explore the landscape of tradwife posts on Tumblr and how internet aesthetics can be used to normalize and spread extremist content online.

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How can we visualize this with data from Tumblr?

This plot includes posts tagged #tradwife, #tradfem, or #tradblr collected from 2019-2022. These tags are tags often used by tradwife posters on tumblr, a popular microblogging site where Barbeau et. al. identified the Cottagecore to Tradwife Pipeline.

The network shows which tags are being used by these tradwife blogs. Two tags are connected if they are often posted together, and the larger tags are posted more often. You can see the “landscape” of topics that tradwife blogs post about in this network. By clicking on a tag you can see how often this tag appears in tradwife posts over time. Here we can see that “cottagecore” was peaked in April 2022, so Tumblr users searching the cottagecore tag at this time may have been exposed to tradwife content or accidentally amplified tradwife views.

Try clicking on other nodes to see if you can discover other "pipeline" tags. You can click on multiple tags at once, and you can de-select a tag by clicking on it. Hover over the tag network to zoom.