“We all know that feeling,” says Charlie Warzel, a reporter at BuzzFeed who’s written about everything from viral misinformation on Twitter to exploitative child content on YouTube. “You flag a flagrant violation of terms of service and send out a request for comment. And you’re just sitting there refreshing, and then you see it come down — and afterward you get this boilerplate reply via email.” Mr. Warzel says his inbox is full of messages from people begging him to intercede with the platforms on their behalf — sometimes because they have been censored unfairly, sometimes because they want to point to disturbing content they believe should be taken offline.

Journalists are not in the business of resolving disputes for Facebook and Twitter. But disgruntled users might feel that they have a better chance of being listened to by a reporter than by someone who is actually paid to resolve user complaints.

Of course, it would be far worse if a company refused to patch a problem that journalists have uncovered. But at the same time, muckraking isn’t meant to fix the system one isolated instance at a time. Imagine if Nellie Bly had to infiltrate the same asylum over and over again, with each investigation prompting a single incremental change, like the removal of one abusive nurse.

The work of journalists is taken for granted, both implicitly and explicitly. In August, the Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, took to his own platform to defend his company’s decision to keep Alex Jones online. “Accounts like Jones’ can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors, so it’s critical journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions,” he said. “This is what serves the public conversation best.” But journalists and outside researchers do not have access to the wealth of data available internally to companies like Twitter and Facebook.

The companies have all the tools at their disposal and a profound responsibility to find exactly what journalists find — and yet, clearly, they don’t. The role that outsiders currently play, as consumer advocates and content screeners, can easily be filled in-house. And unlike journalists, companies have the power to change the very incentives that keep producing these troubling online phenomena.

The reliance on journalists’ time is particularly paradoxical given the damage that the tech companies are doing to the media industry. Small changes to how Facebook organizes its News Feed can radically change a news organization’s bottom line — layoffs and hiring sprees are spurred on by the whims of the algorithm. Even as the companies draw on journalistic resources to make their products better, the hegemony of Google and Facebook over digital advertising — estimated by some to be a combined 85 percent of the market — is strangling journalism.

But throwing light on the coordinated misinformation campaigns flaring up all around us is a matter that is much bigger than the death of print — it’s essential to democracy. It can change the course of elections and genocides. Social media platforms are doing society no favors by relying on journalists to leach the poison from their sites. Because none of this is sustainable — and we definitely don’t want to find out what happens when the merry-go-round stops working.