Years ago my four-year old son came home from his day care centre in a huff. Someone at the centre had taken on the daunting task of explaining God to four-year-olds. My son’s take on the matter was that God resided in heaven and heaven was somewhere in the clouds.

If the story of Amazon kicking Parler off Amazon Cloud had broken that day, my son would probably have seen it as divine intervention.

However, as that story was to unfold some 40 years later, my son’s mind was instead wrapped around the – in his mind totally impossible – idea that people searched for God. How could that be true, he questioned. There is no ladder tall enough to reach the clouds.

On a more serious note, when global mega-actors like Facebook, Twitter and Amazon finally restrict the results of their own actions – their enabling of the spreading of fake news, hate and violence – there is nothing divine about their intervention. They are just scrambling to safeguard their backs.

It’s like the call for non-violence that Trump finally made. Too little, too late, and guided purely by self-interest.

None of these people should have been given the power they have today: not Trump, not the decision makers of Facebook, Twitter and Amazon. I think we all see it clearly, but have no idea what to do about it.

Yet the problem needs to be addressed. There has to be a reasonable way to make sure that social media giants can’t act as gods of free – or censored – speech on their platforms without any real outside control. Owners come and go, platforms easily remain, whether benign – or not.

It’s not only about allowing calls for hate and violence on worldwide platforms. It’s just as much about the ability to suddenly turn the off-switch on a president, however misguided he may be. None of these decisions should be solely up to a few decision makers, whose primary loyalty is to their investors.

Since self-restriction is difficult, there has to be enough outside pressure to ensure that the fine line between free speech and criminal, systematic misguidance is drawn by institutions that have been set up for that purpose with due process.

No border safety measures and defence programs are more important than this. The ever-existing missile threat may prove to be a small problem compared to the threat posed by the potential to subtly and systematically spread disinformation to billions of people.

This has to become a priority for decision makers, however long their to-do lists already are.

Trump did teach us something valuable. The Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly has the right of it: We need to look infinitely harder at who we elect, including examining the candidate’s character and ethics.

However, since this is easier said than done, we also need to look infinitely harder at how lying and bullying could become the presidential norm overnight.

My favourite newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, published a remarkably thorough info package on the what, where, when and why of the Epiphany of Trump’s Presidency.

I am not referring to the Christian holiday Epiphany – although the dates do coincide. I am referring to the storming of the U.S. Capitol; the sudden manifestation of the essential nature of Trump’s presidency: Self-inflicted chaos.

One of Helsingin Sanomat’s excellent articles explained how the angry dissent that Trump built on has been steadily growing online since the early days of the web. What the article forgot to mention is that extremist groups become big much more easily, when they have access to big platforms with algorithms that speed up their growth.

Trump could write the manual on “How to lie and bully your way to the White House”, but he could not have succeeded in creating the chaos of today without Twitter and Facebook.

It’s time to move on and make sure that votes still matter, that good government still matters. We need international co-operation and legislation to ensure that reason prevails on and off social media in the future.

Note: My featured image is an excerpt from Angeles Santos’ painting “A World”. Since the painting is from 1929, it’s safe to say that is was never meant as a commentary on Trump or social media. But somehow it fits our world today. Sadly, my camera never caught the whole painting.