If yelling "Fire!" In a crowded theater is not protected speech then any kind of healthcare misinformation shouldn't be either.
The whole reason you can't yell "Fire!" In a crowded theater is because people could get hurt or killed.
Covid misinformation also gets people killed.
Seems pretty clear to me.
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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SCOTUS: 5 of us concur, and it is clear that yelling "fire" in a crowded theater must be considered protected speech.
Yup. Stacked court means it's okay to tell people to inject bleach to cure disease.
For what it's worth, yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater is not unprotected speech in and of itself. It became a popular analogy in US jurisprudence after being used by Justice Holmes in Schenck v. United States, but it had nothing to do with the question, holding, or even the dicta of the case itself (it was more or less just an off the cuff analogy). This was later tested and clarified by the Branderburg standard which held that for speech to cross the line to incitement (and thus not be constitutionally protected), it must be “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action.” Under that standard, the covid argument would fail.
That being said, many municipalities have disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace laws that will likely get you in trouble if you went around yelling "fire" in crowded spaces (especially dif you actually incited a stampede or a crowd crush, which could then have you on the hook for more serious charges).
But can you yell "There's no fire!" In a crowded theater that has a fire?
How convincing are you?
That's a privilege reserved only for Rene Magritte.
Great. What's next on the docket? Deciding whether falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is also protected speech?
Pretty sure it's denying coup attempts.
That's exactly where I was thinking with this. How about loudly yelling bomb in an airport?? Getting people killed with your mouth seems to be OK a lot of the time. Encouraged even.
They're planning to overturn the bump stock ban, which is what the Nevada shooter used to kill so many people. It makes a semiautomatic gun function similarly to an automatic gun.
It seems like the core of this is whether Freedom of Speech equates to Freedom to Lie. That is a slippery slope to go down, though, because there is a fine line between lying and simply believing something that is wrong.
Do Social Media companies have any responsibility at all to make sure the information people share on their platforms is truthful and isn't harmful? Who gets to decide all that, anyway?
I have a feeling that Truth itself is on trial here. Judging by all the "alternative facts" shaping political discourse these days, I am not confident that the verdict is going to go over well.
Republicans will find that "freedom of speech means freedom to lie," if that's what SCOTUS decides, will come back to majorly bite them in the ass. Because they're far from the only ones capable of lying.
But they are currently the ones most willing.
Yep, until they find it can be used against them even more effectively than they can use them against others. Then they will be the first to scream about how unfair it all is.
While that's true, they're also the only ones with an entire nationwide media ecosystem - broadcast tv (Sinclair), cable (Fox, OAN, Newsmax), radio (conservative talk radio), newspapers, etc - that's entirely willing to back up whatever the conservative narrative of the day is. I mean, we laugh at them for having such a distorted view of reality, but they're very media-captured.
When the truth is on your side, the right to lie really isn't all that helpful.
It's always helpful to find a way to smear your opponent. And if it's legal for you to make an AI video of your opponent, say, smoking meth... why not? It's legal.
Except Republican voters wouldn't care if "their guy" was doing meth...or raping people or killing people or lying or stealing or anything else. Dems are disowning folks like Al Franken for an old photo of a pervy joke and the presumptive nominee for Republicans is a twice-impeached, 91-times indicted huckster with a history of infidelity and screwing over the working class and some pretty damning evidence of actual pedophilia and at least fantasizing about incest. And uh...oh yeah, insurrection.
When you try to smear shit, the shit doesn't get dirty... you do.
Fraud has been illegal for quite a while
You have to gain from lies to be fraud
If only political capital counted as gains, we could jail almost every politician overnight. Also COVID misinfo would count then.
And which party do you really think is going to start arresting their opposition for political gain?
My guess is "not the party that's worried about misinformation. "
Political parties don't arrest people, they'd try to bring up charges. They're doing that right now with the President AND his son. It's already happening. If only there was a way to prosecute that fraud they're pushing for political gain . . .
There's another prong to the issue though, and that's "Does any communication from the government amount to coercion?" Remember that the first amendment protects speech from laws restricting it, but not necessarily requests that other viewpoints be elevated instead. I think the court will find in favor of the right because that's who takes the justices on $1000/day vacations so the law doesn't matter, but no one was ever forced to do anything in the case being heard here and that's the main thrust of the Biden admin's argument.
I think if someone is questioned as to their source for something they post online, and refuses to or can't provide it, there should be grounds to report the comment for removal by admins.
Even if they provide a shit source, it can stay up, because at least people can tell that they got it from a shit source.
My boss is a massive Covid denier. The local radio station today (in the deep South) read a report that Covid cases were higher in the South and the Midwest.
He had some smartass comment about masks and I reminded him that the places where mask mandates were lifted had higher rates of Covid. He dismissed the report out of hand and called the report, from his own source, to be "propaganda."
I legitimately believe that if people want to not wear a mask they forfeit medical treatment. Let Darwin solve this for all.
Misinformation deserves no free speech protection.
However, what remedies are proposed in the event that a government official orders the removal of misinformation that later turns out to be a valid theory. Even if the evidence supporting the theory was unknown at the time of publication, if it was just a kook with a lucky guess, there should be some serious consequences for censoring accidental truth. Experts have been wrong in the past and might be wrong again.
The issue is...is that "misinformation" terminology is decided by who's in charge.
While COVID 19 is very real on one said, If a certain insurrectionist supporting new Confederate party was in power, they would say anything that mentions COVID is misinformation cause it's not rEaL and a HoAx
Same thing with the 2020 election. The same party also says that Joe Biden winning the 2020 election is misinformation and "fake news." How about the existence of LGBTQ individuals? This could be weieled to subjugate others with extreme prejudice
The TLDR is that you would have a "Ministry of Truth."
SCOTUS will likely allow this because of the Pandora's box they would open.
If it is then I should be allowed to say anything I want on airplanes.
The COVID-related national emergency declared on 3/13/20 thru 5/22/23 gave the government no extra abilities to regulate the media as regards said national emergency during the period of said national emergency? Considering how broad, sweeping, and poorly-written US emergency powers are, I highly doubt the government was operating outside its lawful authority by telling media and search engines to take down literal killer misinfo.
right now the only thing the supreme court determines is whose check cleared. they're openly, blatantly corrupt and they advertise themselves as for sale.