I have an idea that maybe others have already thought of, but I haven’t seen it proposed (or implemented) in exactly the form i am thinking of. With all the newfound concern over “fake news”, misinformation, and disinformation, alongside good-old-fashioned government and corporate propaganda (which to its consternation is having some trouble competing with the former), I don’t see why news stories couldn’t be rated or certified as reliable by independent third parties. That is, you could pull up a news story from any of a number of outlets and see that it has the stamp of approval of a particular organization, say the Associated Press or the United Nations. Sites like Politifact and Snopes sort of do this now, but they aren’t rating individual stories. Any organization could create its own rating system, but at least people could choose a rating system they trusted and then either filter their search results or simply have the ratings they are interested in displayed, perhaps in a browser plug-in. It wouldn’t be perfect because it would give people way of filtering so they only hear what they want to hear, but at least we would be doing this explicitly rather than having hidden, amoral, profit-seeking algorithms decide behind the scenes what we see or don’t see.