Mr. Goldman did not respond to requests for comment, and the company declined to make him available for an interview.

It is Facebook’s right to defend itself, of course. The company has faced a raft of accusations of wrongdoing, some of which have indeed been overblown. Facebook was not the only social network manipulated by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the company at the heart of Mr. Mueller’s indictment. And other companies, such as Twitter and YouTube, certainly share the blame for fostering a media ecosystem in which false news and propaganda can flourish.

But Mr. Goldman’s tweetstorm was unintentionally revealing. It showed that, years after hostile foreign actors first began using Facebook to wage an information war against the American public, some high-ranking officials within the company still don’t understand just how central Facebook was to Russia’s misinformation campaign, and how consequential the company’s mistakes have been. (Last year, in a tweet that fewer people saw, Andrew Bosworth, another Facebook vice president, claimed that the effects of Russian interference and fake news in 2016 were “marginal, even in a close election.”)

In real-world terms, a part of Facebook still sees itself as the bank that got robbed, rather than the architect who designed a bank with no safes, and no alarms or locks on the doors, and then acted surprised when burglars struck.