[jefb]

What's the difference between whispering "fire" in a crowded movie theater vs. yelling it out loud? - is it simply the volume of ones voice? Might some intangible like intent have something to do with it? How do you even go about quantifying that? What if everyone laughs at your outburst? What if they trample each other to death?

I feel as though this crowd gets wrapped around the axel on these kinds of questions - anything with too much ambiguity that can't be code golfed into the tersest possible formal logic statement.

When Justice Stewart attempted to define what "hardcore pornography" actual __is__ he simply wrote "I know it when I see it" (1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio).

That's about as good as one can do in some cases.

[roenxi]

That analogy is rather good here because it has a dual interpretation - in terms of the actual history that could be dredged up by wiki editors [0] yelling fire in a crowded theatre has led to ~81 stupid deaths globally and failing to yell fire at an appropriate time has led to at least 278 really stupid deaths in the US. In practice there, there is evidence that yelling fire is not encouraged enough.

There are real threats that are mitigated by an open and tolerant approach to speech. Cracking down on people will lead to a culture that is really bad. Which should be intolerable since the crackdown is only trying to defend against things that are mildly annoying.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

[adamrezich]

> What's the difference between whispering "fire" in a crowded movie theater vs. yelling it out loud?

both are protected speech though

[LindyTalker]

Yelling fire in a crowded theater is not protected free speech, fyi

[AlexandrB]

Well...

> Nearly 100 years ago Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., voting to uphold the Espionage Act conviction of a man who wrote and circulated anti-draft pamphlets during World War I, said"[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."

> That flourish — now usually shortened to "shout fire in a crowded theater" — is the media's go-to trope to support the proposition that some speech is illegal. But it's empty rhetoric. I previously explained at length how Holmes said it in the context of the Supreme Court's strong wartime pro-censorship push and subsequently retreated from it. That history illustrates its insidious nature. Holmes cynically used the phrase as a rhetorical device to justify jailing people for anti-war advocacy, an activity that is now (and was soon thereafter) unquestionably protected by the First Amendment. It's an old tool, but still useful, versatile enough to be invoked as a generic argument for censorship whenever one is needed. But it's null-content, because all it says is some speech can be banned — which, as we'll see in the next trope, is not controversial. The phrase does not advance a discussion of which speech falls outside of the protection of the First Amendment.

From [1] by Ken White, a lawyer. As I am not a lawyer so I can't really comment on the nuance here. But it doesn't seem as simple as "Yelling fire in a crowded theater is not protected free speech".

[1] https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...

[stjohnswarts]

Try it, if you are responsible for someone getting hurt (and any number of other direct implications) you are going to be criminally and civilly liable for it. The theater can sue you for lost profits. That doesn't sound very much like "protected" to me.