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Comment by throwawaaarrgh | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean I can yell fire in a crowded theater again? Apparently not limiting my free speech is more important than the impact of my disinformation.

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It's a myth that it's illegal to yell fire in a crowded theatre, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

What about yelling bomb on an airplane

how is that information is useful even if it's true. it's not like you can walk away.

You can pray, which many people find useful. You might be able to phone home and say goodbye. There might be a bomb squad technician on the plane.

It's not illegal to yell "fire", but you can bet you're getting charged for manslaughter if someone dies as a result.

This isn't far fetched, many people have gotten crushed or trampled in a panic and died as a result.

The CDC yelled "VACCINATE YOUNG PEOPLE" using fraudulent data.

https://twitter.com/kevinnbass/status/1674920880219234304

I agree they should be charged with manslaughter for all the blood clots, heart disease and cancers they caused among young people.

You're going to have to do better than linking to a verified Twitter user if you want most people to take you seriously. Just the fact you get your news from Twitter makes me think you're just spouting what you heard in your echo chamber.

Twitter and Substack are the only places a post like this isn’t censored:

https://twitter.com/jathorpmfm/status/1677001591407116296

On Reddit/Facebook it just gets banned. I regularly read /r/Covid19 to see the fraudulent studies they push so I can counter them with my own studies. Like the Twitter guy says it’s their side that doesn’t want debate.

Your argument for this is that it isn't allowed on platforms that don't allow lies?

And Trump should be prosecuted for treason because he attempted to overthrow the government. Good luck making your case stick. :)

The “fire in a crowded theater” metaphor, in addition to being more a legal myth than a legal principle, is not quite the right perspective to understand this ruling. That said, if we try to use that metaphor to understand this ruling, it is sort of like “a judge has ruled that the federal firefighting organization is no longer allowed to pressure movie theaters to bar entry to moviegoers whom the firefighters suspect will shout fire in the theater”. In this metaphor, the bulk of the ruling is an extensive documentation of the many instances of firefighters and government organizations with names like “Conflagration Interdiction Committee” sending names of specific people to major theaters with comments like “this person regularly posts charts of the flammability of upholstery, do something about it” and then that person gets barred from that theater days later.

There's a really fun, and deeply relevant, historical tidbit on the history of 'yelling fire in a crowded theater.' That statement didn't actually come from any court case along those lines. Instead it was first used by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case Schenck vs the United States, as a metaphor. [1]

So, what was the egregious offense, endangering all of society by words alone, uttered by by Schenck? This "yelling fire in a crowded theater"? Charles Schenck was a member of the local Socialist party, and was distributing fliers urging draft age men to oppose the draft (for World War 1) on the grounds that it entailed involuntary servitude, outlawed by the 13th amendment.

So there's your "yelling fire in a crowded theater" when you concede your right of free speech to the government.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

The meta-lesson I've learned from these types of examples is that language is a slippery construct: the more you wander away from concrete words and specific meanings, in the direction of metaphors and abstractions, the easier it is to convince of yourself of stupid things. It's on the back of my mind a lot when worrying about LLM's. The power to convince, and the power to reason, are very different things.

> worrying about LLM's

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

In my years of arguing with people online (#xkcd386), I notice that those who resort to metaphors and analogies often have the least convincing arguments. Metaphors are great when you're explaining a difficult concept (of which you've attained a satisfactory level of understanding) to a willing listener, but it's really easy to enter the slippery slope you mentioned if the correctness of something is in dispute.

These days when I see a argument based on metaphor, I just ... disengage.

Always could. Because everyone else can see if the theater is on fire or not.

Damn, the US is doomed if we have a systematic expectation of individuals validating people telling them to panic

Fire Fire Fire!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDap-K6GmL0

Who gets to decide what information is "disinformation" and what is the right information?

Any view that you do not approve of is not disinformation.

Also, you are smart enough to recognize disinformation.. but you think everyone else around you is too gullible and would fall prey to "disinformation"

This is the fundamental and intrinsic reason for concepts of free speech.

The power to control what can and can't be shared between people corrupts just like any other power.

We can't trust individuals to distinguish misinformation from "I don't like it" or whatever else.

So we shouldn't. Route around the unsolvable problem. Find another way.

But disinformation isn't just incorrect information. Disinformation is false information seeded with an intent to mislead the population. The person who "gets to decide" what is disinformation is effectively the person who is planting the disinformation.

Once the disinformation starts to propagate then the downstream propagandists may believe they are spreading legitimate truths, but ultimately by definition the disinformation can be traced to a source that intended to deliberately disinform.

Also, not everyone around us needs to be gullible for disinformation to work. In the US for example we live in a country where national elections are routinely decided on razor thin margins, where just a couple of percent or less can flip the results. We also live in a nation where 32% of people believe in ghosts [0]. So there are enough gullible people for the type of disinformation that wouldn't persuade a reasonable person to still yield powerful results.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/style/do-you-believe-in-g...

Why is ghosts relevant here?

If the concept of ghosts are disinformation, who's the person that intentionally planted this seed? Even if that's the case, you'd have to go back thousands of years at least.

You seem to be convinced that ghosts don't exist. Why is that? Note that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Among the millions of potentially fraudulent claims from people reporting to have seen ghosts, just one legit claim would suffice to contradict your premise. I don't know how good those odds are, but I'm guessing they're probably not as bad as you seem to believe.

On the contrary, the claim that "ghosts don't exist" seems to be a prime candidate for being disinformation. Pretty useful thing for secular institutions to have the population believe (regardless of its truth value) if only to wrestle power away from religious and spiritual institutions.

There's an argument that some pieces of the disinformation has some truth to it and thus not being able to say it cause more harm then censoring it. (So which side actually is analogous to yelling fire, the censorship side or the non censorship side.)

Indeed. If there is something smouldering in the theater and someone yells "fire" then is shut down because "Ackchyually it's not a fire!"

Content from .gov sites was labeled disinformation. One could consider the censorship at the time an act of disinformation. Remember the lab leak? Fauci with his smug smile behind Trump knowing full well the NIH sponsored gain-of-function research on Coronavirues in Wuhan of all places. Now that the dust has settled it's no longer a conspiracy theory but the most likely origin. CNN claims them not covering it at the time was "because Trump".

What is even disinformation in this climate other than a comfort blanket for those unable to form an actual argument?

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