Facebook was designed to connect the world and shrink it — and to elevate new voices. Unfortunately, that design was dreamed up by naïve and well-intentioned engineers in a vacuum. Baby photos, weddings, bird-watching communities, Game of Thrones memes and the Ice Bucket Challenge: yes! White nationalists, race and I.Q. debates, clandestine prescription drug and weapons selling groups and Pepe the Frog memes: unthinkable!

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This disconnect between the platform ideal and the platform reality is why Facebook’s rules are arbitrarily enforced. It’s why Facebook’s fact-checking system doesn’t take effect until it’s too late and a piece of content has achieved massive distribution. And it’s why the company struggles to articulate whether it’s a platform or a media company or something else entirely. Facebook, by virtue of the fact that it made $16.6 billion in advertising revenue last quarter, is a media company. But Facebook wasn’t designed to be a media company, especially not one in the middle of an information war. As a platform, Facebook has no real responsibility for the veracity of its content; as a media company, it most certainly does.

Similarly, the press has few answers for how to cover propaganda in an online ecosystem that is designed to spread hoaxes. The heart of the reporting process breaks down when your adversaries’ only goal is to hijack attention. As Aviv Ovadya, the founder of the Thoughtful Technology Project, told me earlier this week, the process of watching the video, even as part of a debunk, “might mean watching it multiple times to tease out the fakery, and then watching the original — embedding negative associations deeper into the brain. It not only diverts attention from everything else that matters; it pushes people to internalize those particular narratives and ways of seeing the world.”

Yet it’s malpractice to ignore a false narrative that’s reaching millions. There are no easy answers, no obvious fixes. As my colleague Zeynep Tufekci lamented last year, “It’s like we’re supposed to fight oxygen but our only tools are matches.”

And then there’s the political reality; the media has even fewer answers for how to deal with a president and his associates who’re prone to trafficking in conspiracies. The media becomes trapped in a vicious cycle of newsworthiness, diverting attention and outrage to false claims and viral hoaxes. After all, the Pelosi fakes weren’t newsworthy because they were high-tech, but because the lie was so blatant and spread by powerful individuals.

In other words, it’s not our systems that are broken, but our political moment. And it’s only going to get worse. We need a new handbook. And quick.