We shouldn’t let them do it.

Content moderation is important and logistically thorny, but not existential. Through the implementation of new monitoring systems and the constant tweaking of algorithmic filters, and robust investments in human intervention and comprehensive trust and safety policies written by experts, companies can continue to get better at protecting users from offensive content. But for those in the press and Silicon Valley to obsess over the granular issues of how fast social networks took down the video is to focus on the symptoms instead of the disease.

The horror of the New Zealand massacre should be a wake-up call for Big Tech and an occasion to interrogate the architecture of social networks that incentivize and reward the creation of extremist communities and content.

Focusing only on moderation means that Facebook, YouTube and other platforms, such as Reddit, don’t have to answer for the ways in which their platforms are meticulously engineered to encourage the creation of incendiary content, rewarding it with eyeballs, likes and, in some cases, ad dollars. Or how that reward system creates a feedback loop that slowly pushes unsuspecting users further down a rabbit hole toward extremist ideas and communities.

On Facebook or Reddit this might mean the ways in which people are encouraged to share propaganda, divisive misinformation or violent images in order to amass likes and shares. It might mean the creation of private communities in which toxic ideologies are allowed to foment, unchecked. On YouTube, the same incentives have created cottage industries of shock jocks and livestreaming communities dedicated to bigotry cloaked in amateur philosophy.

The YouTube personalities and the communities that spring up around the videos become important recruiting tools for the far-right fringes. In some cases, new features like “Super Chat,” which allows viewers to donate to YouTube personalities during livestreams, have become major fund-raising tools for the platform’s worst users — essentially acting as online telethons for white nationalists.

Part of what’s so unsettling about the New Zealand shooting suspect’s online persona is how it lays bare how these forces can occasionally come together for violent ends. His supposed digital footprint isn’t just upsetting because of its content but because of how much of it appears designed to delight fellow extremists. The decision to call the attack a “real life effort post” reflects an eerie merging of conspiratorial hate from the pages of online forums and into the real world — a grim reminder of how online communities may be emboldening and nudging their most violent and unstable individuals .

Stewards of our broken online ecosystem need to accept responsibility — not just for moderating the content but for the cultures and behaviors they can foster. Accepting that responsibility will require a series of hard conversations on behalf of the tech industry’s most powerful companies. It’ll involve big questions about the morality of the business models that turned these start-ups into money-printing behemoths. And even tougher questions about whether connectivity at scale is a universal good or an untenable phenomenon that’s slowly pushing us toward disturbing outcomes.