Ross: Facebook enforces a ‘no jerks’ policy for its users

In a speech last week at Georgetown, Mark Zuckerberg again gave a detailed explanation of how Facebook is making sure all of us can debate politics freely, while at the same time screening out what I’d call the jerks — the people who want to bully, terrorize, and dehumanize.

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All of us have our own threshold for this. I’m on the prudish side; I stopped going to stand-up back in 1982, whereas Zuckerberg is fine with obscenity and satire, but draws the line at hate speech.

“Which we define as someone directly attacking a person or group based on a characteristic like race, gender, or religion,” he stated.

I can see how our more judgmental neighbors might find this discriminatory. But Zuckerberg says history shows that dehumanizing people – even to make a political point – can too easily turn violent.

“So if you say immigrants are vermin or all Muslims are terrorists, that makes other people feel that they can escalate and attack those people without consequences. So we don’t allow that,” he said.

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What he seems to be saying is you can be a loony liberal, or a crazy conservative, but you can’t be a jerk.

It’s like any well-adjusted neighborhood: No one cares about your politics provided your dandelions are under control, you don’t party past 9 p.m., and you don’t burn crosses on your lawn.

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