“We need to do more.” This is the now standard refrain from big tech’s executives caught in yet another civil rights scandal or breathtaking data breach. Sometimes I wonder if they need to do less. Less invasive surveillance into our lives. Less PR-managed spin. Less dissembling before lawmakers. Less lobbying against regulation. Fewer reasons to quit, or wish you could quit.

This week marks the release of two reports commissioned by the Senate select committee on intelligence studying the special counsel-indicted Internet Research Agency’s digital influence campaign. Two groups of independent researchers analyzed data provided to Congress by Facebook, Google and Twitter and came to parallel conclusions. The report by New Knowledge with support from the intrepid researcher Jonathan Albright, who singlehandedly caught Facebook downplaying the scope and scale of the operation, offers clear evidence that the tech companies provided the absolute bare minimum of datasets necessary to study the attack. In particular, Facebook still refuses to disclose the conversion pathways of American users through its targeting and measurement systems, the very analytics it sells to advertisers to prove campaign effectiveness.

This would tell us with considerable precision just how many Americans were targeted and influenced by the hostile foreign operation. There is no evidence that votes were swayed because no control group experiments were conducted, but ample evidence indicates that people engaged deeply with the troll factory’s disinformation, were duped into attending false events, purchased bogus merchandise, and fell into kompromat traps where they divulged incriminating personal information to foreign agents impersonating fellow citizens.

A second report issued by the Computational Propaganda Group at the Oxford University Internet Institute independently corroborates the New Knowledge report, but offers rigorously analyzed details of the astonishing scale of Instagram “meme warfare” offering charts that show how that activity dwarfs the paid ads Facebook hoped we would dismiss and forget.

The OII’s report also helpfully maps the quantity and depth of engagement chronologically to key moments in the political cycle, furthering the evidence that Putin’s digital propaganda agency deliberately engaged in an agile campaign responsive to primary, debate and the news cycle itself. Indeed, big tech’s tools are explicitly designed to target and test on precise segmentations to sell ads for ski vacations and hair product alike while promising the advertiser it will eliminate the waste inherent in the advertising of the 20th century. The Kremlin used our US marketing machine as it was intended, to divide us into many different Americas useful for merchandising and eliminating wasted ad spending.

Facebook’s Chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, issued a statement in response to this week’s Senate intel committee reports. She appeared to be alarmed by how a hostile adversary had focused heavily on attacking the African American community and promised to “do more”.

She didn’t suggest that being able to target people by their political beliefs, ethnicity, or sexual orientation is a dangerous proposition and it is time to radically rethink how people can be micro-targeted on Facebook. She didn’t apologize for being many months late on rolling out a new privacy center to revamp controls to be in better compliance to European data protection laws and norms (GDPR) and the looming showdown in Washington DC over an adaptation of data privacy protections for the United States.

It’s clear that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg believe they can maneuver their way around each scandal as it unfolds, whether it’s another catastrophic data breach (we also learned last week that millions of users had their private photos leaked to unknown third parties), an attack on our democracy, or systemic human rights crises. They can’t admit that they have built a Frankenstein monster.

Former students of mine work at Facebook and Google. For many who earn a master’s from the design and technology graduate program where I teach, Facebook and Google are the ultimate jobs to land. But after this tumultuous year of rethinking big tech, I wonder if these jobs will remain the most coveted careers, despite the inescapable dominance of this duopoly in most people’s lives.

Attitudes have profoundly shifted in a short period of time, evidenced by the reactions to the parade of scandals that have emerged from Silicon Valley over the course of 2018. The industry itself prefers to gather data (or analytics, in their speak) to conduct surveillance on our behavior rather than survey what the press and our social media chatter indicates (“enough is enough”).

To them, people say they want their privacy back and greater competition in the technology industry but we act otherwise. We still use these platforms, enjoying the conveniences only having to switch between as many apps as we have fingers on one hand to do our daily lives online. We may want to explore alternatives, but do any really exist?

