I think transparency is only one piece of the puzzle.
I'm a big believer in the decentralization of the communications system. It's a good thing that we have more voices, more journalists, more reporting. The fact that it is no longer a viable business is a big problem, and we need to address that as a systematic issue in the market.
There is a second piece to this. Consumers are at the beginning of a long process of learning how to consume information on the Internet, in the same way that it took us decades to figure out how to consume information on broadcast channels. In the early days of radio, you could see a similar debate playing out. People said, “Wow, everybody is being misled by this new thing called broadcasting. It's completely different from newspapers. You hear it over the radio and it seems true, and people just take it.” That was considered incredibly alarming.
Now, as you have clearly pointed out, we all know how to differentiate what we want on broadcast. That will come eventually on digital media. The trick here is that it's push versus pull. Instead of going on TV and selecting CNN or Fox, Facebook is being pushed at me.
There are 10,000 different news items that are sitting in my Facebook account that Facebook could choose to show me, but I'm only going to see about 5% of them. Facebook decides which 5% I'm going to see. It decides that based on what it thinks I want, not what I choose.
That may be a business that I'm willing to sign up for, but I need to understand much more about why that happens, and why I'm getting what Facebook has decided I should get. Right now, we don't have that. That's why people are so vulnerable to misinformation.