If I could, maybe I'll jump in on that point.
I think transparency is the clearest set of recommendations that we have, and a number of ideas have been floated.
I published a paper yesterday that I could draw your attention to. It's called “Digital Deceit II”. It is the second in the series. The first was on ad tech; this one is on policy recommendations.
There's a very specific recommendation for ad transparency in that paper. Essentially what it says is that when you get an ad on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, when you put your finger over that ad if it's on your phone, or you hover your cursor over that ad if it's on your desktop, it ought to pop up a little box that tells you a lot more information about that ad: who bought the ad; how much they paid for it; how many people have seen it besides you; and, most importantly, why you got that ad—what the demographic features were that were chosen by the advertiser to make that ad come to you. If you got that ad because the advertiser somehow has your email address or your phone number, they should have to say that too. When I have all that information, I realize, “Wow—I'm going to view this piece of information a lot more critically.”
Our study shows us that a lot of people don't even realize the difference between an ad and organic content, non-paid content.
I think those ads should have a big red box around them so you know they're ads. “I'm going to put my finger over that. I want to see more about why I got that.”
This is directly analogous to how we treat broadcast advertising or pharmaceutical advertising. We have a public interest responsibility for transparency, and we provide for that in the law. There's no reason we can't do that in digital. The companies could do this tomorrow if they wanted to.
The other piece is that all the politicalized ads that come up on Facebook or Twitter or Google ought to be in a database that is publicly accessible. With a lot of political ads, there are a thousand different versions of that ad, and they're microtargeted at small groups of people. Sometimes there are contradictory messages and they're just hoping that no one will notice they're advertising two different things to two different groups. You could never do that on television—you'd get busted in a second—but you can do it in Facebook with no problem.
The Trump campaign was a master at this. We need that database to be accessible to journalists and researchers through a very simple API so that everybody can get access to that data and look at it and understand how political propaganda is working. It's not that it's all illegitimate, only that we ought to know what's happening and how people are trying to influence our views.