The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is by Leon Xiao, whose focus is on the regulation of Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines (VLOPs and VLOSEs) by the EU Digital Services Act; these are defined as having more than 45 million active users in the EU (10% of the total EU population). 25 such platforms had already been identified (two of those VLOSEs, the remainder VLOPs); three more were added recently (including ChatGPT, as a VLOSE).

Under DSA Article 39, these now need to provide a publicly accessible, transparent, and searchable repository of advertising on …

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 …

The next speaker at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Mykola Makhortykh, with a video presentation. His interest is in Russian propaganda curation on search engines. Russian propaganda has of course been a major concern since at least the 2016 US elections; its influence operations have only increased since the illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Much of this is driven by algorithmic information curation systems – via the Russian search engine Yandex, of course, but also through other mechanisms that affect western search engines. This project engaged in an agent-based algorithmic auditing of Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jin Wan, whose interest is in how political efficacy conditions clicks on political content in algorithmic feeds. Political efficacy here means people’s belief in themselves within the political world: this includes internal efficacy (confidence to participate in politics) as well as external efficacy (confidence in the responsiveness of the political system).

How do people with different levels of such efficacy differ in their information selection approaches in algorithmic environments, then? Do they seek a different proportion of political content; do they seek different …

My next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts with a paper by Mykola Makhortykh, whose focus is on the political role of search engines. During the 2024 US election, Donald Trump claimed that Google search engines and autocomplete search recommendations were favouring Kamala Harris; but we know far too little still on how search engines select their search results, and what effects these may have on their users’ information environments.

This particular paper explores how algorithmically selected information might affect users; this is also dependent on how users formulate their search queries, of course …

The next speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are Pascal Schneiders and Andreas Riedl, whose interest is in diversity-oriented news recommender systems. Such ‘responsible’ recommender systems are being promoted as algorithmic solutions to ensuring that users receive a diverse diet of news content; they might pick up on popularity, content, and collaboratively created cues.

The aim here is to nudge audiences towards certain content, breaking through their ideologically shaped, one-sided news exposure and resulting in more diverse news consumption. Attitudes towards such systems depend on technological optimism, feelings of information overload, and …