The decision by the Sri Lankan government this week to shut down the big social networks—including Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Snapchat—in the aftermath of an Easter day terrorist attack on three Catholic churches and three upscale hotels feels like a turning point in our relationship with these platforms. A Gordian knot moment, if you will, where instead of agonizing over how to untangle the social media mess you just pull out a sword and cut.

The coordinated attacks, which took place in three Sri Lankan cities and killed more than 300 people, were designed to foment religious strife in a country that has been slowly recovering from a quarter-century-long civil war. On the 10-year path to peace and stability, there have been occasional flareups of religious violence, such as the anti-Muslim riots in March 2018 that left two people dead. In that case, too, the Sri Lankan government temporarily blocked the social networks to contain the violence’s spread.

One member of parliament wrote on Twitter at the time, “Hate speech on @facebook is increasing beyond acceptable levels #SriLanka. Government will have to act immediately to save lives.” He later amended his comment: “I didn’t mean that way. My bad. NO hate speech is acceptable. I meant discussions were beyond acceptable levels at this tense situation.” We get his point, however, even if it appeared insensitive: Facebook clearly doesn’t care enough about the lies and hatred on its site, and usually that is appalling but survivable. At certain times, however, this negligence is more than appalling, it is life-threatening.

Noam Cohen Ideas Contributor Twitter Noam Cohen is a journalist and author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, which uses the history of computer science and Stanford University to understand the libertarian ideas promoted by tech leaders. While working for The New York Times, Cohen wrote some of the earliest articles about Wikipedia, bitcoin, Wikileaks, and Twitter. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.

The Easter attacks were of a different scale, and the swift decision by the government to act against the social networks placed them in a different category—that is, the authorities were essentially saying that the social networks are no longer considered tools that can be abused by bad actors to exacerbate tensions but weapons that must be removed from terrorists immediately. That same member of parliament felt no need to explain the blackout on Twitter this time. An aide to Sri Lanka’s president was quoted in The New York Times saying “this was a unilateral decision.”

Before our eyes, the world is reassessing the proper role for the dominant social networks. Ivan Sigal, the executive director of Global Voices, an organization committed to using the internet to foster understanding across borders, took to Twitter to observe in light of the Sri Lanka attacks that, “A few years ago we’d be using these platforms to help each other and coordinating assistance. Now we view them as a threat.” He continued, “A few years ago we’d view the blocking of social media sites after an attack as outrageous censorship; now we think of it as essential duty of care, to protect ourselves from threat. #facebook your house is not in order.”

In a more innocent era, social networks were considered incredible communications tools—part phone, part community room, part holiday letter—nothing but a boon for our increasingly disconnected lives. In times of crisis, as Sigal writes, they would bind us even closer together. Soon enough, we began to worry if this was the complete picture. We saw social networks as addictive and not necessarily so good for our own health and the health of children—that is, something we clearly enjoyed using but maybe should figure out a way to reduce our dependence on, either through will power or government regulation. A vice like casino gambling or tobacco.

Now we are recognizing that there is an inherent potential for extremism lurking within global social networks that makes them a danger. There simply may be no safe way to deploy social networks during times of crisis or when bad actors include them in their anti-democratic playbooks. By automatically amplifying any and all messages that appear on their platforms and using highly personal data and algorithms to target those messages to where they will have the greatest potency, social networks are weapons. They must be viewed not as an extension of the people who use them but as a danger to the greater society.