In an essay last month, Renee DiResta — one of the researchers involved in analyzing the social media data for the Senate committee — used the term “Information World War” to describe the battles being waged by nations and ideological factions on social media platforms. Ms. DiResta wrote:

The theatre opportunistically shifts as geopolitical events and cultural moments present themselves, but there is no sign of abatement — only tactical evolution as the digital platforms that serve as the battlespaces introduce small amounts of friction via new security checks and feature tweaks.

Indeed, in the pair of reports prepared for the Senate committee, we see that Russia’s attacks did not stop after Mr. Trump’s election, but they have continued to evolve and adapt. Russians appear to have shifted their focus away from Facebook, where a team of trained specialists now prowls for influence operations, and toward Instagram, another Facebook-owned app that has flown under the radar. The Internet Research Agency appears to have largely sat out the 2018 midterm elections, but it is likely already trying to influence the 2020 presidential election, in ways social media companies may not yet understand or be prepared for.

And Russia is just the beginning. Other countries, including Iran and China, have already demonstrated advanced capabilities for cyberwarfare, including influence operations waged over social media platforms.

Since 2016, tech companies have tried to demonstrate that they are up to the challenge, by bulking up their security teams and rolling out new transparency features. Some of their efforts have paid off, but others have seemed mostly cosmetic — like the “war room” set up at Facebook headquarters ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, a glorified conference room that was nevertheless heralded as the second coming of Stratcom. In the pair of independent reports presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee, researchers criticized these companies for providing incomplete or poorly formatted data sets for examination and for appearing to mislead Congress while answering questions about the extent of Russia’s operations.

There is also something uncomfortably America-centric about all of this investigation. Social media companies have, reluctantly and belatedly, disclosed details about the extent of their platforms’ misuse during the 2016 election in the United States. But they have not made similar disclosures in Italy, France, Brazil or any number of other countries where social media disinformation has played a major role in tectonic political shifts.

The researchers who analyzed data from the 2016 election have framed the continuing battle over disinformation and social media manipulation as a “high-stakes information war.” But if this is indeed a war, it isn’t a simple, bilateral one — with tech firms and American intelligence agencies on one side, and state-sponsored hackers and trolls on the other.