WASHINGTON Mark Zuckerbergs original motto for Facebook was Move fast and break things. It now appears that the CEO is going to have to answer for moving too fast and breaking too many things.

After years of trying to avoid oversight from Washington, the 2-billion-person social network platform is set for a reckoning. This past week, Facebook faced its first major congressional oversight hearings since it revealed that a Russian troll factory, called the Internet Research Agency , had purchased ads on the site in order to influence the 2016 election.

In three committee hearings, representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter were grilled about their sites roles in facilitating the foreign influence operation. Lawmakers from both parties poked at the companies failure to reckon with questions about the lack of transparency in online advertising and the vast power they hold over our lives.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) took particular umbrage with Facebook: Your power sometimes scares me.

Kennedy got Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch to essentially admit that it was impossible for the company to keep track of the 5 million monthly advertisers on its platform. Stretch also ducked and dodged questions about how much user information his company had on specific individuals and whether it could compromise their privacy in search of advertising dollars.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) told Stretch that he preferred a light regulatory touch on industry and then added that dealing with Facebook was something we hope we dont have to engage in legislatively.

You are going to have to do something about this or else we will, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said bluntly.

The hearings may have put the fear of God in the tech companies. Ever since the boom of online commercial activity in the 1990s, Silicon Valley has fought to avoid any kind of regulation, taxation or oversight from government, state, local or federal. Facebook is currently trying to fight off any federal oversight. The company has hired two crisis PR firms and registered two new lobbying firms this year. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg appeared at official events in Washington ahead of the hearings and gave an exclusive interview to Axios Mike Allen.

But what would regulation for Facebook even look like? We asked the experts.

Time to investigate

Determining how to regulate Facebook may first require some kind of definition of what it is.

Reporter Max Read posed this very question in New York Magazine earlier this month. What do you call a website that allows you to share baby pictures with former high school classmates and also receive targeted advertising with the most fine-grained precision possible? Facebook brags about connecting us to our family and friends and also about directly influencing the outcomes of elections across the globe . It sits on top of industries including journalism, where it, together with Google, essentially controls the distribution channels for online news and, in effect, the way people discover information about politics, government and society.

Facebook, Read argues, is like a four-dimensional object that we catch slices of when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize. Its really hard to get a handle on it.

Listen to Paul Blumenthal talk about Facebook on HuffPosts So That Happened podcast at the 16:00 minute mark below.

The best way to figure out exactly what Facebook is and does is to launch a public investigation, argues Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, a think tank that supports tougher antitrust enforcement.

We need a select congressional committee to just look at Facebook and figure out all the things it does, Stoller said.

Such a committee could examine Facebooks ownership of multiple social networks (it owns Instagram and tried to purchase Snapchat). An investigation could look at the companys use of virtual private networks (VPNs) to gauge what apps are popular and identify good takeover targets. Or it could check Facebooks massive advertising business and how it is used to influence elections or to target retail ads at users immediately after they look at a product on another site . A committee could determine how such a large corporate enterprise works and examine how this affects populations , suss out anti-competitive behavior , examine and remedy invasions of peoples privacy , and find out if it is undermining human autonomy .

What about legal changes?

While activists like Stoller push for a dedicated committee to investigate Facebook, the federal bureaucracy and some members of Congress are working on fixing the problem of untraceable political advertising.

Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) are drafting legislation to require large online platforms like Facebook, YouTube (owned by Google), Instagram and Snapchat to maintain public databases of all political advertising , including ad buyer and targeting information. The Federal Election Commission reopened its consideration of disclosure requirements for online election advertising and is currently seeking public comment.

Stoller proposes that Facebook go further by informing each user who was specifically targeted by ads purchased by the Internet Research Agency.

Facebooks Stretch told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the technical challenges of determining which users were exposed to the propaganda and then contacting them are substantial.

But Warner called the idea of reaching out to affected users an interesting question about what obligation you might have. He compared it to legal requirements that medical facilities inform patients if they may have been exposed to a disease.

Yochai Benkler, the Berkman professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School, has suggested another change: Lawmakers could pass a bill to require social networks to identify bots (automated accounts) and sockpuppets (fake accounts run by real people) so as to detail their role in spreading political advocacy advertising. No legislation has been discussed yet to tackle the problem of social media bots spreading paid propaganda.

Aside from the political advertising issue, Stoller believes that Facebooks dominant position in social media the company is often referred to as a monopoly could be remedied by forcing it to become interoperable with other social sites. He likened this to a 2001 Federal Communications Commission edict requiring any new video-chatting service provided through AOL Instant Messenger to be interoperable with its competitors video-chat products.