Abstract
Problem statement: The formation of public opinion in the digital age is no longer a product of citizens' direct exposure to legacy news media alone; it is rearranged within algorithmic systems of content production and distribution. Despite a growing international literature on the effects of algorithms on exposure diversity and news trust, the link between this phenomenon and Iranian scholarship, and the operation of recommender systems within Iran's media governance context, remains under-examined. Objectives and questions: The study formulates the relationship between media governance, algorithmic curation and algorithm literacy in Iran as a testable conceptual framework. Method: This is a conceptual-interpretive analysis based on a critical synthesis of a purposive corpus of 47 Iranian and international documents (peer-reviewed articles, official institutional reports and policy documents), organised through Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). It is neither a registered systematic review nor a primary empirical study. Findings: The four-layer analysis yields a theoretical proposition termed the sovereignty paradox: in dual governance systems, a filtering policy intended to consolidate informational authority may displace that authority from domestic institutions towards the opaque recommender systems of international platforms, thereby weakening the very control it seeks to secure. The proposition is consistent with Zuboff (2019) and with the divergent finding of Jürgens and Stark (2022), but has not been tested against direct Iranian data; its falsification conditions are stated explicitly. Conclusion: Among four alternative futures, the path that elevates media literacy from an individual, content-centred level to an institutional, infrastructure-centred one is identified as the most desirable — though not necessarily the most probable — on the basis of an explicit normative criterion: maximising sustainable institutional capacity for informed judgement. The main contribution is a conceptual framework and a set of testable policy hypotheses for future empirical research.