# Digital Gatekeepers: Google's Role in Curating Hashtags and Subreddits

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14370 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14370/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Defining and Detecting Toxicity on Social Media: Context and Knowledge are Key](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10788/) (2021)
- [Measuring Personalization of Web Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05011/) (2017)
- [Public sentiment analysis and topic modeling regarding COVID-19 vaccines on the Reddit social media platform: A call to action for strengthening vaccine confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13293/) (2021)
- [Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter's Streaming API with Twitter's Firehose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5204/) (2013)
- [Just Another Day on Twitter: A Complete 24 Hours of Twitter Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11429/) (2023)
- [What Makes Online Communities 'Better'? Measuring Values, Consensus, and Conflict across Thousands of Subreddits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05835/) (2021)
- [Similarity of symbol frequency distributions with heavy tails](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00277/) (2015)
- [Calibration of Google Trends Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13861/) (2020)
- [Analyzing behavioral trends in community driven discussion platforms like Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07087/) (2018)
- [Subreddit Links Drive Community Creation and User Engagement on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10155/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and learning the language for different types of harassment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00644/) (2018)
- [Competition Dynamics in the Meme Ecosystem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03952/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [The Power of Framing: How News Headlines Guide Search Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17131/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.