Make social media abusers pay a price

Brian Valenti deserved worse, but he probably got the most Coconut Creek could give him.

Police Chief Butch Arenal this week suspended Valenti, a 23-year member of the department, for five days and ordered him to undergo sensitivity training. The discipline resulted from Valenti’s Facebook post that criticized last Friday’s “die-in” at a Coral Springs Publix.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas survivor David Hogg helped to organize the protest, which took place in the store’s parking lot. In his post, Valenti hoped that “some old lady loses control of her car in that lot.”

Valenti fell back on the usual — and unpersuasive — defense that he meant the post as a joke. If that’s true, we question whether someone with more than two decades in law enforcement deserves to keep his job, given his poor judgment. Only the warped could have taken Valenti’s comment as humorous.

Union rules, however, have reinstated officers who have done much worse. Arenal’s punishment should stick. The chief was right, too, to order social media training for all officers. For not only do such offenses reflect poorly on the individual officer, they affect the entire department.

However effective the training might be, though, technology is just the enabler. It allows people to express any opinion at any time, but social media doesn’t create the opinion.

Brian Valenti reportedly is “distraught.” If so, he should be questioning what prompted him to post that hateful message in the first place.

If someone had wanted to question the event Hogg helped to organize, there were ways to do so without looking hateful. One could have accused Hogg of overreach. “Die-in” organizers targeted Publix because of the company’s campaign contributions to Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, who is running for governor and calls himself a “proud NRA sellout.”

Putnam’s remark from last year sounded tone-deaf after the Stoneman Douglas massacre. Some customers might consider boycotting Publix for its support of Putnam. But the line of those who might have blood on their hands from the Parkland shooting does not include Publix. The grocer doesn’t sell weapons or set policy on who can buy them.

Many social media users, however, seek to vilify their opponents rather than address the issue. We have seen this regularly with the Stoneman Douglas students who continue to campaign for tougher gun control.

Right-wing author Dinesh D’Souza, himself an admitted felon whom President Trump pardoned on Thursday, mocked the students when the Legislature voted down legislation to ban military-style assault weapons. A Maine legislative candidate called Emma Gonzalez “a skinhead lesbian.” Conspiracy fabricator Alex Jones dubbed a speech by Adolf Hitler over Hogg’s speech at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington. A video of Gonzalez tearing up a gun target was doctored to make it appear that she was destroying a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

Such vitriol is reprehensible, from wherever on the political spectrum it oozes. Marion Hammer, the National Rifle Association’s chief lobbyist in Florida, is on the other side of the gun control debate from Hogg. Yet she has been a target, too.

“I can’t wait to flip on the news to see you mourning a gunshot victim,” said one email to Hammer. The person also hoped to read one day that NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre had “died of a gunshot wound that took days of pain before he succumbed.”

This week, alleged comic Samantha Bee used a vulgarity to describe Ivanka Trump. She wasn’t on social media, but she went over the line same. Bee issued the pro-forma apology.

The anonymity of email and social media empowers people to disseminate what might have stayed in the basement or the bar two decades ago, though family and friends should call out bigoted and hateful speech in private, too.

But a higher standard exists for public figures.

Roseanne Barr discovered that this week. ABC canceled her show after Barr exposed her racism on Twitter. Like David Valenti, she tried to apologize for what she claimed was a bad joke.

Also like Valenti, Barr answered to someone. ABC might have lost an estimated $60 million in profits next year from the show, but the network and its parent company — image-conscious Disney, which, by the way, has contributed more to Putnam’s political action committee than has Publix — stood to lose much more if Barr stayed on the air.

The spreading of hate and fake news — the real kind — will ease on social media only when a penalty comes with it. We must call out bad behavior by those with whom we agree, not just those on the other side of an argument. It starts in Washington and ends in places like Coconut Creek. Our civic life depends on it.

Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Elana Simms, Andy Reid and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.