A lesson from RedNote: hashtags that repel male predators

Faced with oppression and sexism, women have found a way to avoid having to interact with men.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that it’s a tough time to be a woman on the internet. The web amplifies the sexism inherent in our society and makes it a million times worse, often cheered on by crowds of trolls who have given rise to the incel movement and Gamergate, among others.

Finding spaces where women can support each other is tricky for those online – which is why female users of social networks are increasingly having to turn to ways to take back control of their online lives, such as making their accounts private.

Other, slightly more subversive methods have been trialed, however – including one that researchers at several US universities have identified on Xiaohongshu, commonly known in the West as RedNote.

Chinese women on RedNote are deliberately appending the hashtag "Baby Supplemental Food" or "BSF" to their posts on the Instagram-like platform to stop male users from viewing their posts.

The researchers looked at 5,800 posts tagged with the hashtags, then interviewed users, finding around 85% of the tagged posts were unrelated to baby food – a seeming deliberate decision to avoid male harassment in the face of ineffective platform moderation.

Boring conversation

Hijacking “boring” conversations like this is an attempt to persuade men that there’s nothing interesting to discuss on that hashtag and to give women a space where they don’t have to always assume they’re being watched by men.

Men are unlikely to be interested in conversations about baby food, the theory the users are pursuing goes, so they will actively not click on anything tagged with the term.

The researchers interviewed around two dozen women who use RedNote in China and explained that’s precisely why they’re taking solace in the hashtags. “From our interviews, we learned that women users began re-appropriating the #BSF hashtag as early as 2022,” the researchers wrote.

Those who decided to adopt the strategy usually initially encountered the re-appropriation usage on their Explore pages and then asked fellow users for more information about why the content wasn’t related to the hashtag.

“They discovered that the hashtag was re-appropriated to prevent male users from seeing posts because the women content creators thought men would not be interested in childcare topics,” the researchers explained.

“Hijacking “boring” conversations like this is an attempt to persuade men that there’s nothing interesting to discuss on that hashtag and to give women a space where they don’t have to always assume they’re being watched by men.”

Cat and mouse game

“I saw others using it, and we discussed that it seemed effective,” one of the women who uses the strategy told the researchers. “We also talked about how men on the platform rarely post about their families, as they tend to focus on themselves – how great they are or how they direct the world. They never think about their home or family.”

This particular woman estimates that around 95% of men avoid those hashtags – with the remaining 5% usually being gay men who aren’t interested in hitting on or harassing the women there.

Of course, highlighting this strategy means that some men may well decide to eavesdrop on the hashtag in the future, and undoes the idea that this was somehow happening outside of detection. But the same strategy can be repurposed with other hashtags.

What the issue really speaks to, however, is the struggle that female users of social media platforms have in finding adequate protection from harassment using platforms’ own content moderation or community guidelines enforcement – which is a broader issue the platforms themselves need to tackle.