As the partisan sniping rages over the degree of culpability Robert Mueller’s investigation assigned to President Donald Trump regarding Russian collusion or obstruction of justice, one uncontested and shocking conclusion requires urgent attention.

America fell victim to a Russian cyber-attack hellbent on influencing the 2016 presidential election. Mueller’s investigation determined that Russian internet trolls flooded social media with targeted falsehoods designed to help Trump.

The Russian effort to collect personal data and transmit propaganda to specific demographic groups was vast and clever. But it was by no means groundbreaking. The weapons of mass disinformation used by the Russians were American-made Facebook, Google and Twitter.

American social media companies, along with commercial marketers (including The Day) and domestic political consultants, have been harvesting and exploiting personal data on social media since the platforms first appeared.

Indeed, the business models for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google rely on commercializing demographic databases of social media users. The Russians simply co-opted a marketing technique created by American enterprise. Data mining of personal information has exposed the private lives of social media users to surveillance capitalism and political manipulation.

The Russian hack has intensified pressure on the internet giants to monitor content posted on their social media sites, and to better protect user privacy. They have shown they are not up to the task.

Facebook has been singled out for its lax policing of content and privacy safeguards. While the company has taken measures to improve privacy and content reliability, voluntary self-regulation is not getting the job done. Congress needs to intervene and establish regulatory policy standards.

The idea gained an influential and unlikely ally last weekend when Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and CEO, called on Congress to establish standards and practices for social media companies like his.

“I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators,” Zuckerberg wrote in The Washington Post. “By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms.

“It’s impossible to remove all harmful content from the Internet,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But when people use dozens of different sharing services — all with their own policies and processes — we need a more standardized approach.”

Zuckerberg recommends a global standard for privacy protection. He pointed to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation as a model for establishing comprehensive privacy guidelines.

Zuckerberg’s commentary is a rare and welcome appeal from a corporate titan for the government to regulate capitalist pursuits. Congress should take notice and act by passing a federal privacy law that protects online users’ personal data from exploitation by organized manipulators.

The Honest Ads Act, introduced in 2017 by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and the late John McCain (R-Ariz.) would require that the identities of advertisers be disclosed to improve the transparency of online political advertisements. The bill is languishing in the Senate. It should move toward passage.

Regulating online content is a tricky proposition, one that raises important First Amendment free speech concerns. But there is precedent. Traditional news media outlets, for all their foibles and biases, adhere to journalistic standards. Print publishers and broadcast outlets are held accountable by legal liabilities for the content they produce. Radio and television stations must apply for license renewals based on adhering to standards and practices.

Although social media provides “news feeds” from third-party sources, they do not adhere to journalistic standards or legal accountability for content. Content that purports to be news transmitted via social media or the internet should be held to the same legal and journalistic standards.

Crafting this important legislation will require regulations that affirm privacy safeguards and political transparency without imposing censorship on free speech.

If nothing else comes from the release of the full Mueller report, it should serve as a clarion call that the country faces serious threats from social media disinformation. Privacy and civil rights violations are rampant and unchecked. This is a danger to democracy and to the dignity of its individual citizens.

This is a national security threat that demands federal regulatory intervention.

The Day editorial board meets with political, business and community leaders to formulate editorial viewpoints. It is composed of President and Publisher Timothy Dwyer, Executive Editor Izaskun E. Larraneta, Owen Poole, copy editor, and Lisa McGinley, retired deputy managing editor. The board operates independently from The Day newsroom.