@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://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.119/",
    pages = "2402--2415",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
    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."
}