We’re treated to fresh reports nearly every day about how Facebook Inc.’s efforts to keep bad actors from abusing its platform fall short. The latest include U.K. legislators’ inquiry into whether Russians used Facebook to influence recent British elections, and reports that atrocities in Myanmar may be incited in part by fake news on Facebook.

Even before this wave, Facebook’s role in the spread of divisive messages and outright falsehoods had inspired soul-searching at the company, and a newfound humility at the top. In a string of blog posts, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg promised to do more, including hiring 1,000 additional people to review political ads purchased on Facebook. Meanwhile, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was recently dispatched to Washington, D.C., on a charm offensive.

Yet many outside Facebook refuse to wait for the company to solve these problems—and others yet to be uncovered—on its own. Pressure is mounting, at home and abroad, from legislators, regulators and activists, all looking for various ways to nudge and, in some cases, shove Facebook to acknowledge and act on its responsibility as the most powerful distributor of news and information on Earth.

While Twitter , Google’s YouTube unit and many other social-media platforms face similar problems, they don’t all command the same audience as Facebook. But what happens to Facebook will likely apply to them all.

Compared with mature industries, the internet giants—Facebook, Google, Twitter—are relatively unregulated by federal and state law. “That’s what I think Facebook is most nervous about,” says Ryan Goodman, a professor at the New York University School of Law who researches Facebook’s legal and moral responsibilities—that “the sleeping giant wakes up and realizes just how unregulated they are.”