As Twitter has grown, that problem has become increasingly unmanageable. Former executives I’ve spoken with at the company are emphatic about illustrating just how difficult a task it is to monitor the hundreds of millions of tweets sent on Twitter every day. But instead of developing a product solution that could scale alongside Twitter’s growth, the company has relied on a team of moderators to police its platform in real time—an approach that sometimes results in major backlogs. “As a tech company, the way to solve these problems was—we’re seeing growing volume,” one former executive told me. But instead of finding a technological solution, Twitter’s “glacial pace of innovation and inaction” has been part of what’s stymied efforts to solve its myriad quality issues.

There’s a certain genius to the way these bot networks have infiltrated the Twitter platform. In the early days of the 2016 election interference campaign, Russian actors did not appear to take sides in political debates on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. Instead, accounts associated with Russia sometimes took both sides of any given debate—in one particularly remarkable example, Russian trolls organized two sides of a protest in Texas and encouraged attendees to confront each other in the streets. These campaigns may not be effective at changing hearts and minds, but they’re plenty effective at inflaming debates, sowing distrust, and spreading conspiracies that undermine our ability to talk to each other.

Equally remarkable is how little Twitter has done to crack down on bots. As my colleague Nick Bilton has reported, Twitter isn’t particularly committed to solving a problem that has plagued its platform from the beginning:

Over the years, there have been countless suggestions from researchers, other tech companies, and even internal employees at Twitter, about what the company can do to fix this problem and deter the development and nefarious use of bots. Some of these reports go back many years, like one from 2010, where researchers pointed out how the bot epidemic was increasing, and how it would be incredibly easy for good bots to break bad. But time and again, Twitter and others did nothing to stop these tactics.

When Bilton wrote a series of articles for The New York Times in 2014 about the ease with which anyone could buy bots—something he proved by buying a bot farm himself—Twitter responded not by fixing the problem or issuing a statement, but by killing the bots and moving on as if nothing had happened. Twitter “knew about all these fake followers, and always has,” Bilton writes, “eliminating just enough bots to make it seem like they care, but not enough that it would affect the perceived number of active users on the platform.”