In a promising development, Facebook recently removed a Trump campaign ad for violating its policy against misleading political posts. But that one example of diligence by a platform that inadvertently enabled Russian election interference in 2016 doesn't negate the broader remaining danger: A new study finds a majority of political ads on Facebook fail to disclose their funding sources, in violation of the platform's own policy.

This doesn't instill confidence in the company's ability to reduce the threat of more election interference this year through self-policing. It's time to start talking about bringing the politicos who use these unregulated platforms under the same campaign-regulation oversight they face in other media.

Notwithstanding the irresponsible doubt-seeding of America's current president, we know that Kremlin-affiliated operatives used bots, phony accounts and fabricated news stories in 2016 to manipulate public opinion and undermine trust in the election. Intelligence experts say similar ploys already are afoot again this year. And foreign entities aren't the only problem. The campaigns themselves, and their domestic supporters, have tended to play games with the facts on the internet in ways they probably wouldn't attempt with more traditional campaign ad venues.

For example, the Trump campaign recently put an ad on Facebook asking people to take the "Official 2020 Congressional District Census" — but then directed those who clicked to a fundraising website for the campaign. The ploy was especially problematic because this is the first year the census is offering genuine online participation as part of the counting process. The fundraising ad was almost certain to sow confusion about the real census. So Facebook pulled it down, as it certainly should have.

If only the safeguards always worked so well.

New York University researchers who studied political ads on Facebook report that during a recent 13-month period, more than half the ads on the platform failed to disclose who was paying for them — this despite a Facebook policy, instituted in response to Russia's 2016 interference, that requires disclosure of that information. The researchers also found evidence of various groups pushing calculated messages made to look like they're coming from grassroots communities.

Facebook says it is aggressively self-policing its platform to weed out these violators, and maybe it is. But the stealth ads alone are worth an estimated $37 million to the company, raising the question of how much incentive it really has for a crackdown.

It's neither practical nor desirable to try to legislatively regulate all information on social media, but federal law can and should regulate campaign ads, as it already does for ads on television, radio and print. Perhaps the solution is to stop treating Facebook and other social platforms like they deserve special status. Start treating them like just another form of media — with a corresponding responsibility to enforce the same rules the others do.

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