Facebook Follies

If Facebook is going to police speech on its site, it sure has its work cut out for it.

That’s more than clear from the social-media platform’s bans of women who post negative comments about men, even when made sarcastically, in jest or just to make a point about the policy.

Of course, the postings — comments like “men are scum,” “all men are ugly” and “men ain’t s--t ”— aren’t surprising, given the recent torrent of sexual-harassment allegations. Last month, nearly 500 comedians posted some variation of “men are scum” to protest the Facebook diktat; nearly every one of them was banned.

Comic Marcia Belsky got 30 days in FB lockup. Kayla Avery said she was slammed nearly 10 times just for posting things like “men continue to be the worst.”

True, the words aren’t always pretty, and if other groups — women, minorities, gays — are going to have special protections, it seems only fair that men should get them too. In June, ProPublica found that the site regarded white men as a “protected” group, though a spokesman later insisted “all genders, races and religions are protected.”

But if ever there were such a thing as a slippery slope, Facebook is on it. Indeed, in its attempt to enforce civility, even its own “moderators” have trouble knowing where to draw the line: In some cases, it wound up removing the ban and apologized for its moderators’ “mistake.”

It’s hard to fault Facebook for wanting to keep discourse on its site civil — and it’s leagues ahead of Twitter on that score.

But unless it manages to do that without squashing “reasonable” speech, it’s going to face some well-warranted resentment.