Historically, US free speech has been "crazy rant" = okay, "fire!" (in a crowded room) = not okay.
And that worked, when distribution was relatively centralized with respect to network size.
However, now I think we have a third category, somewhere between the previous two: "fire!" (on a widely- and easily-disseminated medium).
The sheer scale of social networks makes the effect fundamentally unlike prior scenarios.
I really wish people could find a different expression to convey what they mean by this, because what they/you mean by this is probably worlds apart from what this phrase actually meant when it was formulated.
> ""Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular metaphor for speech or actions made for the principal purpose of creating panic. The phrase is a paraphrasing of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution."
I think we can all agree that protesting the draft should be protected by the first amendment.
> I really wish people could find a different expression to convey what they mean by this, because what they/you mean by this is probably worlds apart from what this phrase actually meant when it was formulated.
A bit yeah, right on Wikipedia [0]:
> The paraphrasing differs from Holmes's original wording in that it typically does not include the word falsely, while also adding the word "crowded" to describe the theatre. The original wording used in Holmes's opinion ("falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic") highlights that speech that is dangerous and false is not protected, as opposed to speech that is dangerous but also true.
Additionally:
> The First Amendment holding in Schenck was later partially overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Maybe that's not as dramatic as "yelling fire in a crowded theater", but I think that's actually a good thing.
That is exactly what happened when this phrase was first used (it was used when a person was prosecuted for speaking against the war under the guise that he's "hurting the war effort" - you can see how this trick works) - and it has been used many times after to validate persecution of speech that hurt nobody but that you could construe a byzantine logical way it could in theory hurt somebody is you really really want to believe it. And that's exactly the problem.
Is this even true? There are a billion people on Facebook, but it's not like a given post ever gets seen by more than a small fraction of them. Nearly the entire human race has been reachable by postal mail for over a hundred years; the size of the network really has nothing to do with anything.
What has changed isn't the size of the network, it's the culture. The CDC and a thousand independent doctors say that vaccines don't cause autism, but too many people don't believe them over the mother of a kid who both has autism and was vaccinated, even if that mother has no real evidence that one caused the other.
The problem there isn't that someone is saying something which is wrong, it's that other people are too credulous of unverified claims. Nobody should believe outrageous claims from some random stranger with no domain knowledge and who is contradicted by multiple domain experts, unless they're stricken with enough curiosity to actually replicate the experiment themselves. And even then they shouldn't believe based on the word of the stranger but rather their own observations or those of someone they themselves find trustworthy.
The solution isn't censorship, it's to teach people how to properly evaluate evidence instead of being credulous and easily manipulated fools.
When communication was expensive you could only talk to people in your physical vicinity. If they had stupid ideas, you had stupid ideas. A town even a few dozen miles away would have an entirely different set of stupid ideas.
What's different now is that the clusters aren't based on geography, so there is more overlap and you encounter people whose set of stupid ideas are different than yours. That's actually a good thing -- it's how a lot of them get stamped out because they're so obviously bad that they can only survive when no one is even attempting to challenge them.
The problem now is, instead of there being a third world village full of people who think crazy things and whose children die of preventable causes but nobody else has reason to care that they exist, now there's a few of those people in every town getting infected with measles and then showing up to school with your kid. So now we have to care more about idiots being wrong because said idiots live closer to home than they did before.
But the way to fix wrongness isn't censorship. That's how you make wrongness increase, because as soon as you erroneously censor something true, nobody can say it in order to argue that it shouldn't be censored.
The way to fix wrongness is education and debate. Which is real and continuous work instead of a switch you can flip and make the problem go away. Sorry.
Using the postal reference, something may have taken a week to transmit to 100 people. Now, it takes 5 seconds.
That's a fundamentally different situation, and it requires different tradeoffs in society.
But Facebook and Twitter inject extremely harmful falsehoods into reams of fluff and corporate posts. This gives them far more legitimacy, weight and exposure than they would otherwise have. And since those two have made agitating posts part of their business model, regardless of historic levels of societal harm, the problem is not fixed.
I would be appalled if anything I built were used to do such harm, I would use every ounce of my being to stop it. If necessary I would shut the whole thing down rather than have my name remembered forever as such a facilitator. Obviously Zuckerberg has a different mindset and is clearly no Alfred Nobel.