When Johnson & Johnson removed all the Tylenol from American stores in the wake of a poisoning scandal, it did so because of the liability it would face if anyone got hurt. But 8chan, Reddit, Facebook and YouTube are totally protected from being sued for content on their networks because of this unique set of laws created at the beginning of the internet.

The safe harbor laws were created for what is known as passive (or neutral) intermediaries. Verizon, for example, is a passive intermediary platform: It makes no attempt to edit or alter the bits flowing through its fiber optic cables. Facebook and YouTube, however, are active intermediaries; they present you with content different from what they present to me. They filter pornography and jihadist videos off their networks using artificial intelligence. As such, they should not be shielded from liability by safe harbor laws in the same way that Verizon is shielded.

Even though Facebook was able to use A.I. to block 90 percent of the Christchurch streams after it identified the video, last year Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress that it might take five to 10 years to perfect these tools. But society cannot wait five to 10 years — we need to stop these videos now, and banning toxic content must become the highest priority at 8chan, Reddit, Facebook and YouTube.

Some may argue that deciding what counts as toxic video content is a slippery slope toward censorship. However, for the past 75 years, since the first television broadcasts, the Federal Communications Commission has been able to regulate offensive content on television. I believe we can all agree that mass murder, faked videos and pornography should not be broadcast — not by cable news providers, and certainly not by Facebook and YouTube. Since broadcasters do not have the protection of “safe harbor,” they engage in a certain level of self-regulation, to avoid being sued. The Federal Communications Commission rarely has to intervene. And there is no reason to believe that the largest corporations in the world — Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon — would behave differently from CBS, Fox, NBC or ABC.