Unfortunately, the range of potential responses to this problem is limited. The First Amendment grants broad protections to publishers like Facebook. Diplomacy, even the harsh kind, has failed to dissuade Russia from meddling. And it’s even less likely to under the current administration.

Daniel Kreiss, a communication scholar at the University of North Carolina, proposes that sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube maintain a repository of campaign ads so that regulators, scholars, journalists and the public can examine and expose them. But the companies have no impetus to concur and coordinate. And Congress is unlikely to reform a system that campaigns are just learning to master.

Facebook has no incentive to change its ways. The money is too great. The issue is too nebulous to alienate more than a few Facebook users. The more that Facebook saturates our lives, families and communities, the harder it is to live without it.

Facebook has pledged to install better filtering systems using artificial intelligence and machine-learning to flag accounts that are run by automated “bots” or violate the site’s terms of service. But these are just new versions of the technologies that have caused the problem in the first place. And there would be no accountability beyond Facebook’s word. The fact remains that in the arms race to keep propaganda flowing, human beings review troublesome accounts only long after the damage has been done.

Our best hopes sit in Brussels and London. European regulators have been watching Facebook and Google for years. They have taken strong actions against both companies for violating European consumer data protection standards and business competition laws. The British government is investigating the role Facebook and its use of citizens’ data played in the 2016 Brexit referendum and 2017 national elections.

We are in the midst of a worldwide, internet-based assault on democracy. Scholars at the Oxford Internet Institute have tracked armies of volunteers and bots as they move propaganda across Facebook and Twitter in efforts to undermine trust in democracy or to elect their preferred candidates in the Philippines, India, France, the Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere. We now know that agents in Russia are exploiting the powerful Facebook advertising system directly.

In the 21st-century social media information war, faith in democracy is the first casualty.