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Keller @ Large: Fight Back Against Social Sewage

BOSTON (CBS) - We are in the middle of a red-hot presidential campaign, and when passions run high, tempers flare. When that happens, civility and manners take a back seat, or are ejected from the car altogether.

Perhaps there's nothing that can be done about that, now that the internet has provided every lout in America with a public megaphone. Or maybe we just need more umpires, like Major League Baseball ump Bob Davidson.

Davidson was working the plate at Tuesday night's game in Philadelphia when a fan started heckling him, at first, with a standard-fare epithet, somewhere between "you stink" and outright profanity. But then the fan escalated things and became profane, and the ump had him ejected. "There were kids there and young girls there," he explained later. "They don't have to come here and listen to that."

I applaud Davidson's decision, and I wonder - should we be pushing back harder on those who abuse their First Amendment right?

That right is not absolute and never was. It doesn't include the right to incite violence or panic.

But the wide-open, unedited world of social media has given some among us the impression they are free to bully, slander and spew inappropriate language all over the web. Companies like Twitter and Facebook wring their hands about this but have yet to do much to curb it.

That leaves it up to us to play umpire. We can't eject every offender, but we can reject them, block violators from our Facebook and Twitter feeds, call out creeps who act out in public, and so on.

Shame and shunning can be powerful tools. It's time we start using them to stem the tide of social sewage.

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