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Comment by zentiggr | Hacker News Reader

How do we push back on these agencies for their obvious flawed process?

Constitutionally amend the EU, revert it to being more of an economic body than a judicial body.

We don’t push back on the process, we push back on the principle.

The point of the principle of free speech is not that all speech is beneficial but that we can’t possibly trust any agency with the power to decide what is and isn’t.

The “process” probably has no more flaws than any other process designed and implemented by mortals, it just goes to demonstrate why the whole censor-the-internet idea is wrong.

Where do you stand on falsely claiming "fire" in a crowded movie theater?

Depends on how false false is. If someone actually believes there to be a fire that's one thing. If someone is clearly doing it with intent to cause harm to others, then that's a crime and they should be charged with such; after the fact.

I'm against installing verbal filters on everyone just in case someone might shout 'fire' in a crowded place with intent to cause harm.

If someone actually believes there to be a fire that's one thing

You don't have to wonder, there are long defined and continuously refined standards in operation. But it's irrelevant to the thread, so we don't need to detail them here.

I'm not a lawyer but am pretty sure it would fall under any number of other laws if someone was to get hurt or you caused a disruption. There doesn't need to be a separate law protecting you from someone saying something you find objectionable.

- disturbing the peace ( if nobody got hurt ) - causing bodily harm by criminal negligence - inciting to riot

This has always struck me as a weird sort of edge case, because the hypothetical situation is pretty disconnected from all the other situations where people might seek restrictions on free speech that it doesn’t really matter which way I go.

If I say that yes, I suppose we can carve out some sort of exception for people who directly cause harm to life and limb by falsely proclaiming the existence of immediate dangers in crowded areas, then this doesn’t seem like a slippery slope — I am not forced to then admit we should also start censoring anything else outside that very narrow category.

If, on the other hand, I say that free speech should apply even to those shouting fire in a crowded theatre, am I worried that this is going to suddenly become a major danger? Are psychopathic pranksters going to start causing fatal stampedes at every opening night? No, because it’s not something that actually happens; anyone shouting fire in a crowded theatre would probably just get shushed and escorted out by ushers; at worst they’d provoke an orderly evacuation through the plentiful emergency exits that theatres tend to have nowadays.

So I guess I’ll go for the second option — refuse to carve out the exception and accept the risk of the occasional unnecessary evacuation.

There are other small and well established edge-case restrictions on free speech I am willing to accept, mind you, eg market manipulation or giving false statements to police. But I don’t see the classic fire-in-theatre one as being relevant to anything.

This contradicts the point you were making before, which I was responding to, where no agency is qualified to establish limits, so I guess this part of the thread is over.

HOWEVER

refuse to carve out the exception and accept the risk of the occasional unnecessary evacuation

You're still hung up on theaters, not to mention a whole whack of cherry-picked hyper-specific scenarios. Look into the Hillsborough Disaster some time. Or here's an on-point example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Hall_disaster ...would that be no fault of anybody in the free-speech society you are advocating? Maybe pulling a fire alarm would have to be established as a form of speech first, but I bet that could be done.

> This contradicts the point you were making before

No it doesn't, you don't need an agency butting in case-by-case to have specific exclusions.

> Hillsborough Disaster

Too many people, bad management of the crowd, how is this relevant to speech at all?

> Italian Hall disaster

I think it's fair to blame the design of the building and overcrowding here. Blaming the person that yelled fire is good for vengeance but not very good for safety and accident-prevention.

> This has always struck me as a weird sort of edge case,

Actually, it's not if you look at it a different way. We have Free Speech in the U.S.A., but there are many instances where it's illegal (and rightly so) to lie. You can't lie about your finances to the IRS. You can't lie in court when under oath. You can't ruin someone's reputation by lying about him (i.e., slander or libel).

And you can't lie about there being a fire in a theater.

I'm old enough to remember when conservative pundits would pose similar challenges when discussing which forms of contemporary music needed to be outlawed. So where I stand is that I've learned to associate anyone offering the fire in a crowded theater argument as another advocate of the prevailing moral panic.

Well, then let's take your favorite other-example! My point is not to relitigate the "fire" standard or any individual case, but to point out that

The point of the principle of free speech is not that all speech is beneficial but that we can’t possibly trust any agency with the power to decide what is and isn’t.

those agencies already exist! So, in order to execute GP's preferences, what agencies shall be eliminated? I find that tends to focus the debate and reveal the parts that are based in reality and those that aren't.

Perhaps I should stay away from recognizable cases or be sure they aren't lightning rods, knowing that people are going to get hung up on the specific example. It's hard to do that, though.

The "fire in a crowded theater" argument was created by advocates of the prevailing moral panic, in fact. The panic in question was anti-war and anti-draft propaganda by socialist parties in the USA during WW1, and the phrase originated in a Supreme Court ruling that said that it's legal for the federal government to imprison people for speaking such horrible things.

It never ceases to amaze me how common this trope remains in defense of censorship, given that it was designed as a slippery slope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

> The "fire in a crowded theater" argument was created by advocates of the prevailing moral panic

I know.

Bad decision. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM

Next to the fire exit

You don't. The indirection designed into the EU to isolate the government from the governed is deliberate and there is no recourse.

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