Holocaust deniers aren't impacted very much either way. Banning them from Facebook will do nothing. They will always find new rocks to crawl under.

The problem is not so much that Facebook has banned breast-feeding moms (though that is a bit dicey); it's that it has already , Nazis, and other hate groups. So it drew a line in the sand a while ago. The question is whether Facebook should scrub out that line and redraw it slightly to the left of the anti-Semites. And then redraw it again when somebody else with a megaphone complains about the next batch of lunatics and haters who've camped out on Facebook's lawn. And so on, ad infinitum.

Any service that becomes an arbiter of appropriate content finds itself in the same bubbling grease pit. Amazon discovered this last month when , only to end up inadvertently shoving gay and lesbian books into the closet. It's only going to get worse.

Beliefnet blogger Padmini Mangunta notes that, as a private company, Facebook is not legally bound by the First Amendment. It can regulate speech as it pleases. But she says it from groups that, unlike the KKK or the Nazis, do not promote physical harm.

So the question isn't if Facebook has a legal obligation to remove these groups, but if they have an ethical obligation. After thinking on it a bit, I have to say no. In fact, I would say that under the ideals many of us live by, they have an ethical obligation to remove these groups, provided they do not cause or advocate harm.