Since the inception of gatekeeping research in the 1940s, most studies on gatekeeping have been human-centric, treating and studying individuals as gatekeepers, who perform their gatekeeping role using a combination of the following mechanisms: forming communities, and/or broadcasting, discovering-searching, collecting, organizing, or protecting information. However, the nature of communication channels and how information is produced by and shared with users has fundamentally changed in the last 80 years. One significant change is the growing use of technology-enabled metadata like hashtags when sharing information on social media. Rarely any study investigates whether hashtags can perform gatekeeping of information and what it means for information gatekeeping. This paper fills in the gap by conducting a content analysis of 77 interdisciplinary studies on hashtags and gatekeeping to confirm how they can implement six gatekeeping mechanisms. This study shows that hashtags expand our understanding of the role of technology solutions in gatekeeping and advance research on hierarchical gatekeeping. The benefits of hashtags for gatekeeping suggest that they act as “information anchors” for online communities, thereby highlighting the utility of information gatekeepers for society.

中文翻译：

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用于将社交媒体上的信息看门的主题标签

自 1940 年代守门研究开始以来，大多数关于守门的研究都以人为中心，将个人视为守门人并对其进行研究，他们使用以下机制的组合来发挥守门人的作用：形成社区，和/或广播，发现-搜索、收集、组织或保护信息。然而，在过去的 80 年中，沟通渠道的性质以及信息由用户产生和与用户共享的方式发生了根本性的变化。一项重大变化是在社交媒体上共享信息时越来越多地使用支持技术的元数据，如主题标签。很少有研究调查主题标签是否可以执行信息把关及其对信息把关的意义。本文通过对 77 项关于标签和把关的跨学科研究进行内容分析，以确认它们如何实施六种把关机制，从而填补了这一空白。这项研究表明，主题标签扩展了我们对技术解决方案在看门和推进分层看门研究中的作用的理解。话题标签对看门人的好处表明它们充当在线社区的“信息锚”，从而突出了信息看门人对社会的效用。