The next speakers at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno are Guna Spurava and Arjen van Dalen, with a focus on algorithmic content recommendations and media governance in the Nordic and Baltic region. Both perspectives may have valuable contributions to make here. Algorithmic content recommendation systems affect how people access news and information, and this is a challenge for media regulation; is there a new governance paradigm emerging here, or to regulators continue on established (and perhaps no longer appropriate) paths?
Communication values are normative principles about what communication should achieve; in the Nordic countries these extend overall welfare state principles of universalism, freedom, diversity, public service, and quality; in the Baltics independence, pluralism, transparency, accountability, and democratic participation.
Algorithmic systems, by comparison, are not value-neutral, and their embedded values may conflict with such state values – these algorithmic values are difficult to extract, but can be explored through explicit policy documents and algorithm audits.
This are of interest was examined through a series of 14 interviews with Nordic and Baltic media governance actors, then. Interview transcripts were coded thematically to identify value statements, and these were sorted into value clusters. Interviewees often made explicit references to values, in fact.
What emerged from this were six value clusters: accountability (a need to justify algorithmic recommendations), agency (an ability for users to autonomously decide what content they expose themselves to), information quality (exposure to information that enables users to make informed decision), pluralism (accessibility of and exposure to diverse perspectives), freedom of expression (ability to speak freely without sanction by algorithmic systems), and protection from harm (limiting access to problematic or illegal content).
For accountability, a shift from self- and co-regulation to external scrutiny and institutional oversight emerged as desirable; for agency, a shift from a simple choice of offerings to the ability for users to influence selection, ranking, and recommendations; for information quality, a shift from arms’-length approaches to direct intervention in algorithmic systems, and greater audience responsibility; for pluralism, a shift from diversity across media sources to diversity of individual exposure to different information; for freedom of expression, a shift from the right to speak to the right to be heard; and for protection from harm, a shift from reactive responses to harmful content to more proactive limitations to the circulation of problematic content.
