The sudden influx of ``TikTok refugees'' into the Chinese platform RedNote in early 2025 created an unprecedented, large-scale online cross-cultural communication event between the West and East. Although prior HCI research has studied user behavior in social media, most work remains confined to monolingual or single-cultural contexts, leaving cross-linguistic and cultural dynamics underexplored. To address this gap, we focused on a particularly challenging cross-cultural encoding–decoding task that remains stubbornly beyond the reach of machine translation, i.e., foreign newcomers asking Chinese users for Chinese names, and examined how people collectively constructed a digital ``Babel Tower'' through various information encoding strategies. We collected and analyzed over 70,000 comments from RedNote with a creative human-in-the-loop approach using large language models, deriving a systematic framework summarizing cross-cultural information encoding strategies, how they are combined and layered to complicate decoding, and how they relate to engagement metrics such as the number of likes.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems