That’s a great point.
If I were sitting at a restaurant and mumbling strange things, people around me might get offended. I might be asked to leave the restaurant.
If I were sitting at a restaurant and pulled out an AR-15 and left it on the table. People around me would freak out. Here, even without using the weapon or breaking any law, I have caused a lot of harm to the people around me.
No they would not. This example makes no sense.
It is very similar to the ticking time-bomb argument that was used to justify torture. What happened to that?
“24” went off the air. And a black Democrat got elected President.
But it’s too soon to say which side . . .
Because the point of the example is that yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is not constitutionally protected speech. You seem to have it backwards.
[QUOTE=Oliver Wendell Holmes]
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
[/QUOTE]
That might be a failure of imagination on your part. Advocating against vaccination; distributing instructions on making bombs; spreading violent, radical ideologies…all can have far worse outcomes than offending people, and all are shielded by the First Amendment.
Good point. Not that my European arse is convinced by it, but it is a good point 
But public policy should be made in response to issues that affect the public. Policies have to live and die on their own merits, not on their origins. So this “you’re exploiting a crisis!” thing is mostly just an excuse to forestall discussion on an issue that people don’t want to get talked about. The polite term for this is bullshit.
“Shit happens” has to be the most useless, uninformed thing anyone could possibly say in a discussion of public policy. Of course shit happens. Does it happen at random? Can nothing be done about it? Can it be prevented? “Shit happens” doesn’t address any of that. What it actually says is “I don’t want you to talk about this, so stop talking about it.” That’s not very persuasive, is it?
These examples you have given are easily negated by using the Supreme Court’s logic on such First Amendment Issues.
You are free to spread lies about vaccines as much as you want. But for every 10 people who spread lies about vaccines, there are 10M people who spread the truth about vaccines. So, at the end of the day, it does not really matter.
People are protected and free to spread mis-information. But for every such person, there is an overwhelming majority that spreads the truth.
Unfortunately you’re wrong. It does matter and it kills people, and it’s going to get worse. But it’s probably best saved for another thread.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. First, you say that there are already laws against cyberbullying. Then, you say that no one would be taken seriously if they tried to introduce laws against cyberbullying. Which is it?
That’s not what your cite says.
Re-read what I said.
I said that there are laws against cyber bullying. But no-one would take a parent seriously if they demanded sweeping laws against the internet (e.g. ban Facebook, Twitter, monitor internet, etc).
Here’s another link that says the same thing:
California school officials will soon have the authority to discipline students who cyberbully, whether it takes place on campus or off. The new law becomes effective in January.
Even if it does matter, it has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Being mis-informed about food, diet and alcohol also matters and kills people. Do you blame the First Amendment for those?
No, the point is that falsely shouting fire is not protected – and never forget, that quote comes from a case that really should have gone the other way regardless of whether they were shouting “falsely” or not and wherein, in hindsight, they were not in fact shouting falsely.
Moderated, sure; minimized, perhaps. Negated? Nope. People killed by vaccine-preventable illnesses remain dead, even if the anti-vax movement can, hopefully, muster fewer supporters than the pro-vaccination side. There’s no tipping point where the harm done by bad speech drops to zero by virtue of the quantity of good speech, and that harm can be far worse than mere offense. I’ll put Marx and Wakefield’s indirect death tolls against any mass shooter’s.
This isn’t to say that firearms shouldn’t be regulated, of course, but it should be recognized that all our rights have associated costs, not just Second Amendment rights.
It’s not a question of blaming the amendment. The issue is that speech can harm people. You can value free speech and still acknowledge that point.
No, it doesn’t.
I dont agree with you. You could substitute anti-vaccination advocates with anything that might lead to poor choices and poor outcomes. What about the anti-healthy advocates? Or pro-smoking and pro-gambling groups? There are plenty of groups that advocate unhealthy and harmful lifestyle choices. But, you cannot blame the First Amendment for someone’s poor choices.
There was this famous case on Twitter, with some handle @ComfortablySmug spreading false information during Hurricane Sandy. Now, would you hold the First Amendment responsible if I trusted @ComfortablySmug over @localnews or TV alerts and braved the hurricane? Wouldn’t I personally be to blame if I risked my own life because I chose to believe false information on twitter over reliable information on TV?
In @ComfortablySmug’s case during Hurricane Sandy, that is exactly what happened. Within minutes of sending out his false tweets, journalists discovered he was spreading rumors and quickly corrected the record, sounding the alarm not to trust his information. Regardless, no one was hurt because of his misinformation. The next day, @ComfortablySmug (whose real name is Shashank Tripathi) apologized and resigned from his job as the campaign manager of a House Republican candidate in New York in response to the public’s reaction to his actions.
The truth prevailed, not through forcing censorship or jailing a person for speaking, but through the overwhelming counterbalance of more speech. As Holmes said after his soliloquy in Abrams, “That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/
The “exploiting a crisis!” thing is meant as a defensive measure against someone attempting to use the public’s emotional reaction to bypass what would otherwise fail to meet rational muster at calmer times.
Were the people who fought against the Patriot Act, who urged restraint in a time of public insanity, just trying to forestall discussion on an issue? No, they were fighting against people exploiting a crisis to push through something that wouldn’t have passed on its own merits outside of the crisis. People who have an agenda to push that the public wouldn’t generally support just lie in wait until the right crisis comes along to exploit.
“Shit happens” has to do with people’s inability to put things into perspective and to evaluate relative risk. Should we rush to discuss whether air travel should be legal immediately after a big, dramatic crash? No, we should calmly evaluate the cost and benefits of air travel over the long term. People are rarely capable of doing this individually - people are terrible at risk assessment and putting things in their proper context. Which is why, in theory, we employ rational actors to evaluate the big picture for us, and not just knee-jerk at every crisis.
How many people have died in mass shootings in the US over the last 20 years? Maybe 8 a year? Something in that range. Even amongst gun crime specifically, those numbers are insignificant. Even if you want to address specifically reducing deaths from guns, focusing on these oddities is misguided and a statistical blip. Rationally. And yet on the emotional radar, these incidents all become huge. People think they’re in grave danger even if they have a roughly 5-10/320,000,000 chance of dying to a mass shooter.
Essentially, the response to these mass shootings are the perfect demonstration of hysteria over substance. There are thousands of ways you’re far more likely to die, and yet these are what capture our national attention and fear mongering. Even if your entire focus is reducing deaths by guns, these are far down on the list of things to worry about.
Therefore any calls for policy responses to them are going to more or less be equivalent to the Patriot Act - using public hysteria to push through an agenda that it wouldn’t rationally support without the crisis.
So how do you communicate this idea? The idea that your emotional reaction to a crisis should not set policy and trump my legal protections? “Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights” is tactless, but more or less covers it.
But I feel the same way about the erosion of fourth amendment rights and various other government power grabs in the wake of 9/11. “Your toppled buildings don’t trump my right not to be treated like a suspect by the government” would be a similar sentiment.
Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.