Digital Gatekeepers: Google’s Role in Curating Hashtags and Subreddits
Amrit Poudel, Yifan Ding, Tim Weninger, Jürgen Pfeffer
Abstract
Search engines play a crucial role as digital gatekeepers, shaping the visibility of Web and social media content through algorithmic curation. This study investigates how search engines like Google selectively promotes or suppresses certain hashtags and subreddits, impacting the information users encounter. By comparing search engine results with nonsampled data from Reddit and Twitter/X, we reveal systematic biases in content visibility. Google’s algorithms tend to suppress subreddits and hashtags related to sexually explicit material, conspiracy theories, advertisements, and cryptocurrencies, while promoting content associated with higher engagement. These findings suggest that Google’s gatekeeping practices influence public discourse by curating the social media narratives available to users.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{poudel-etal-2025-digital,
title = "Digital Gatekeepers: {G}oogle{'}s Role in Curating Hashtags and Subreddits",
author = {Poudel, Amrit and
Ding, Yifan and
Weninger, Tim and
Pfeffer, J{\"u}rgen},
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.119/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.119",
pages = "2402--2415",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}