What is most disturbing about the report, however, is the startling volume of passive voice it employs when discussing the propaganda blitz, because there isn't any real way to know who or what is behind it. Some of it, says Politico, is probably organic; some of it looks suspiciously like what Russia did in 2016; some of it seems to have been authored by as-yet-unidentified actors. And its decentralized nature might play a role in making disinformation harder to stamp out, since successfully repelling one prong of attacks—if and when that occurs—will do nothing to limit the damage caused by the others in the meantime.

As Politico's report correctly notes, the candidates who will suffer the most grievous consequences here are the ones who don't invest sufficient resources in building out robust digital operations—ones specifically designed to "combat misinformation and dictate their own online messaging." The problem with this proffered solution is that there is only so much a campaign can do from the outside to accomplish this task, especially since so many demands on its limited resources exist. Besides, even the quickest, sharpest, fact-checkiest response to a hashtag smearing a candidate as, say, a secret Kenyan-born Muslim will do little to dissuade people who are predisposed to disliking the candidate from internalizing that message. Once an appealing, bias-confirming lie is trending, there isn't a clean way for a campaign to erase it.

Once again, then, the integrity of American democracy may rest largely in the hands of the tech behemoths who provide the services through which disinformation is distributed: primarily, Facebook and Twitter. The companies detailed to Politico their efforts to learn lessons from the national debacle that was 2016: Facebook says it now has 30,000 "safety and security" personnel who are cracking down on various forms of misuse, while Twitter claims to have challenged and/or suspended "millions" of accounts displaying "spammy and automated behavior" over just the first half of 2018.

All these developments are, of course, good. (Better three years late than never.) But the reactive nature of such defensive maneuvers raises the question of whether it is possible to both have social media as it exists today, and also rid social media of malevolent actors who use it for bad things. The Jack Dorseys and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world will always err on the side of preserving their user bases, in part because they are wary of censorship accusations and in larger part because they'll have to answer to shareholders for decisions, no matter how well-intentioned, that might have an impact on their respective bottom lines. Until these sites are subjected to the sort of regulation that their roles in our lives merit, everyone in politics is going to be stuck on an uneven playing field—without any good idea of where they stand on it.