work / researchThe Incessancy of Hashtag “Go Back To The Kitchen” and Responses to Normalized Online Misogyny
It started with a phrase girl gamers kept hearing the moment anyone realized they were female. We pulled a year of TikToks under those hashtags and studied the comeback posts. What we found: tagging turned a private insult into something shared, and it connected women who had been through the same thing. Published in the ASIS&T Proceedings in 2022, it became one of the organization's most-read works and has been cited internationally.
What I did
The coding: watching hundreds of videos, reading captions and comments, and tagging what is happening until patterns surface. Slow, unglamorous work, and the reason the findings hold up.
Why it stuck
I learned how to read the internet in Dr. Diana Daly's class at the University of Arizona. Not what people post, but what they mean by it. That's the thread between this paper and what I do now.
Daly, D., Smith, M. R., & Bao, D. (2022). Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 59(1), 659–661. https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pra2.682