In Silicon Valley, people always talk about the void left behind by Steve Jobs. It’s a fascinating parlor game, and it usually leads to endless hypothetical questions, all coalescing around how different life might be if one of the world’s greatest innovators was able to lend his genius to our problems, large and quotidian. People wonder if the latest iPhone might look nominally different were Jobs still tinkering with his definitive product. What new sector, others wonder, would Jobs have moved Apple into, and presumably dominated: driverless cars? Spaceships? Little Apple computer chips that we implant in our brains?

What they rarely, if ever, talk about is how Jobs might have felt about what has happened to Silicon Valley in the seven years since he passed away. In that relatively short period of time, technology has been harnessed by both the left and the right to divide us as a society. It’s not quite the dent in the universe that Jobs had envisioned when he co-founded Apple in 1976. Sure, it’s impossible to know how Jobs might have reacted to the world we live in today, but I can’t imagine he would have tolerated the lackadaisical inactivity of the generation that succeeded him in combatting fake news, election meddling, and rampant hate speech. Many of the tech leaders who do run today’s giant companies have often appeared more concerned with their stock price and monthly-active-user rates than the impact their platforms have had on our society.

Jobs, as a recent article in Vanity Fair perspicaciously noted, was hardly a moral compass. He was a brutal executive, who treated people (including family members) viciously. Yet, when he was alive, Jobs was not just the leader of Apple, but had an impact on Silicon Valley as a whole. He was one of the few C.E.O.s back then who championed privacy for users, while Facebook and Google were creating an entire business model focused on the complete opposite. For all of Jobs’s faults—and there were countless—I doubt very much that he would have allowed on his platform Alex Jones, the Sandy Hook denier and putrid sicko, who has spent years on various social platforms attacking Muslims, the media, parents who have buried their toddlers to gun violence, and, less horrendously but more strangely, both the weather and Sesame Street.

Jobs’s silent hand was invoked this week, ironically, shortly after Apple’s market capitalization briefly crossed the trillion-dollar threshold—an extraordinary, unparalleled accomplishment in American business. Days after Apple’s achievement, Tim Cook appeared prepared to use his authority to make an obvious, but heretofore avoided decision: he decided that Jones should no longer be allowed on Apple’s podcast platform. Mark Zuckerberg, who recently defended Infowars’s right to remain on Facebook, followed suit, removing Jones and Infowars, which had repeatedly violated Facebook’s terms of service without much reprisal, from its platform. Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai fell in line, too, and Jones was banned from YouTube.

Jones’s exile is certainly welcome news, but it’s hardly worthy of real celebration. After all, what the hell took so long? People can say all they want about free speech online, but there are limits to free speech in public that should be applied to the Internet. While someone like Jones can go into the street and blabber ridiculous conspiracy theories, he can’t walk into a movie theater and yell that there is a fire, if there isn’t actually one. In 1919, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that the First Amendment does not protect dangerous speech. People running out of that theater en masse, and getting injured as a result, is illegal. The same is true for people who threaten to harm others: that’s a crime. It should be online, too.

The one company that chose not to ban Jones is also the company that probably perpetuates more hatred than any other online: Twitter. The social network stated that his comments do not violate Twitter’s terms of service. This is, of course, ironic, given that Twitter was the first to ban Milo Yiannopoulos, who is still active on other platforms. As Mike Monteiro, the co-founder of the design firm Mule Design in Silicon Valley, noted on Twitter, “If Alex Jones doesn’t violate your rules, you need better rules.” That’s true. But it’s also a reminder of how badly the industry needs a real leader. Maybe now that Cook has led Apple over the trillion-dollar summit, he can focus his attention on leading the people who run these other companies in Silicon Valley. It’s become all too obvious that someone needs to.