To put it bluntly, Facebook still hasn't figured out what to do about fake news stories on its site. The trolls who plagued social media during the 2016 election were consistently steps ahead of the social media giant, and the steps that the company has taken since the election have mostly had the opposite of their intended effects, like how Facebook's new policy for authenticating and labelling political ads is mostly allowing political ads to slip by while flagging and removing news stories about politics.

Other tech companies aren't faring much better in navigating a post-2016 world. After Twitter verified a neo-Nazi in the wake of the deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, the company responded by suspending the verification process entirely. In the months since then, the platform has earned a terrible reputation of coddling far-right users while tripping over themselves to punish others for lesser offenses.

In their defense, tech companies are trying to take seriously the threat to democracy that they represent. In late May, seven major companies, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, met with representatives from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in order to figure out how to best combat the inevitable deluge of fake news heading into the 2018 midterms. Unfortunately, per the New York Times, the meeting didn't go how the companies had hoped:

But the people who attended described a tense atmosphere in which the tech companies repeatedly pressed federal officials for information, only to be told — repeatedly — that no specific intelligence would be shared.

The tech companies shared details about disinformation campaigns they were witnessing on their platforms, but neither the F.B.I. nor the Department of Homeland Security was willing or able to share specific information about threats the tech companies should anticipate, the people said.

One attendee of the meeting said the encounter led the tech companies to believe they would be on their own to counter election interference.

This is, in short, very bad. Former diplomats are already warning that China, emboldened by the complete lack of consequences Russia faced after the 2016 election, is poised to start replicating their political interference. And if Facebook and other companies are as slow to respond to new threats as they have been in the past, they're likely woefully unprepared to mount an effective resistance. So why on earth would the agencies that are supposed to focus on this kind of work be so laissez-faire? Again, from the Times:

Part of the problem, officials say, is that the White House has expressed little interest in the problem of Russian interference, and that the apathy has had a trickle-down effect. Without pressure from the top, it can be difficult to bring together all the different strands of intelligence collected across America’s spy agencies, and evaluate how to act on it.

Republicans have maintained since the 2016 election that the Russian election meddling was fine because there's no evidence that it was successful. But of course, that's spin. They don't care because the meddling, successful or not, was in their favor, and the party has shown again and again that their only objective with elections is not preserving their integrity or making sure every votes counts, their one concern is winning them.