Digital Gatekeepers: Google's Role in Curating Hashtags and Subreddits
This research highlights Google's role as a digital gatekeeper influencing public discourse by curating social media narratives, which is an incremental analysis of algorithmic bias in content visibility.
This study investigated how Google's search algorithms selectively promote or suppress certain hashtags and subreddits, revealing systematic biases that suppress content related to sexually explicit material, conspiracy theories, advertisements, and cryptocurrencies while promoting higher-engagement content.
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.