Long criticized for being longwinded, President Joe Biden this week delivered a stark, concise and stinging indictment of Facebook’s record during the pandemic. “They’re killing people,” he said.

The following day, faced with sputtering anger from the powerful company, President Biden partially walked back his statement. Facebook was not, in fact, killing people but should deal with the rampant disinformation about coronavirus vaccines on its platform that has led to so many Americans being unprotected.

Biden had it right the first time.

The president didn’t misspeak; he didn’t oversimplify. He just said the quiet part out loud. From facilitating genocide and domestic extremism, to the sale of deadly painkillers, and, yes, COVID-19 disinformation, Facebook is causing many people to lose their lives.

In 2015, for example, Facebook ignored warnings about its role in Myanmar, where it was being used to incite violence against the country’s minority Muslim population. By 2018 a report from the United Nations had found that Facebook played a role in the genocide that resulted in the murder of roughly 25,000 Rohingya Muslims.

Now, the same failed moderation and algorithmic amplification tools that have incited violence around the world are driving violence at home. In June 2020, federal officer Dave Patrick Underwood was murdered in Oakland by Steven Carrillo, a member of the anti-government “Boogaloo” movement. The Boogaloo had a strong presence on Facebook and relied on the platform’s private Facebook groups to promote the killing of law enforcement, organize ranks — even share bomb making instructions.

My organization, the Tech Transparency Project, warned about the dangers of the Boogaloo’s Facebook growth in April and identified some of the most concerning groups, the same Facebook groups where Carrillo was a member. Facebook didn’t remove the groups until after Underwood was killed.

Months later, Facebook was again pegged as a source for inciting violence that led to two murders in Kenosha, Wisc. A Facebook event for a “call to arms” posted by the militia group, the Kenosha Guard, was reported 455 times and never removed by the platform.

The platform’s role in organizing domestic extremist violence culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in the death of five people. Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg claimed that the Capitol riot was not organized on the platform. But TTP found that Facebook was a critical organizing tool for militia members and extremists to recruit and organize the event.

Facebook’s refusal to deal with other harmful activity on its platform results in deaths every day. For instance, Facebook and Instagram, which it owns, are major conduits for trafficking of opioid painkillers, which have fueled a surge of overdose deaths in the United States. Facebook has also served as a massive marketplace for the trafficking of conflict antiquities from countries such as Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq. The antiquities are trafficked on the platform by militants and terrorists to fund their war crimes.

After Biden’s clear call for Facebook to deal with the consequences of its business model, Congress should take up the baton. Whether its fomenting violence, fostering genocide or facilitating trafficking, Facebook’s lawless platform has contributed to countless deaths around the globe, even before the COVID-19 epidemic. Unless the administration and Congress step up to regulate Facebook, they will continue to do so for years to come.

Katie Paul is the director of the Tech Transparency Project, which investigates the influence of tech platforms.