Let's just be honest about CloudFlare. They write these hand-wringing posts occasionally to try to justify their 'policies', but their policy is quite literally 'block someone if enough people demand it on twitter'.
So they are lying when they say "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life"?
You lack the imagination to think of alternative possibilities other than they're lying?
Is there any evidence that it is true other than the word of one person? The Cloudflare post didn’t provide any examples, and it seemed to be news to the Kiwi Farms people as well.
Just a few days ago Cloudflare took a pretty strong stance that they would not take action so for them to flip-flop like this in such a short period of time they must either have received:
- Strong proof that there has been an escalation, and there is an immediate threat to human life.
- Pressure from investors who are worried about the stock price and company’s image
- Their own set of threats against Cloudflare employees for refusing to take action
- Word that a large company who uses their platform was threatening to remove all traffic ($$) from Cloudflare unless they took immediate action
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof so if they can’t provide the proof, it seems far more likely they caved to social/investor pressure.
I hope you see the irony of taking a big tech CEO at their word and criticizing someone else for lacking an imagination when they suggest an alternative.
The Cloudflare posting was by Matthew Prince, who's an officer of a public company. Misleading the public about the company would be unlawful for him.
The blog posting says, in part, that unprecedented things were posted to Kiwi Farms, and that they've contacted the police in several jurisdictions about these things. The police keeps records, so if that were a lie it would be the kind to be very easily shown to be false in front of a judge. It would also be simple to avoid that kind of specific sentence in the blog posting, so you may be quite confident that the statement is true.
Which then means that Cloudflare will stand by its customers through any shitstorm, except if the shitstorm manages to goad the customer into doing something that warrants contacting the police.
>Misleading the public about the company would be unlawful for him.
Do you really believe this? Or rather, even if it's unlawful, who do you think will hold him accountable for this? Obviously CF should report some stuff to the police as minimal CYA, but even if they didn't who's going to subpoena these records? I guess Moon might have cause for a defamation suit or something here but obviously it's unlikely to reach this point in a courtroom.
I have it on good legal authority that if lies are to be told, something factual and disprovable like those references to police, then one arranges to have them be told by someone in a suitable department rather than by an accountable officer. Press, marketing, something.
Because in this case, accountable really means it.
IANAL, but the law you are talking about is "no fraud", and it's not Delaware code it's the SEC. When a public company officer lies about issues that could impact the price - and these interactions with law enforcement and regulation def qualify - they could cause people to misvalue the company.
There was 2 specific threats. One bomb threat posted to KF proper, and one threat posted to 4chan from outside her apartment that referenced the KF forum on a piece of paper that was photographed.
Nice sloganeering, but it's hardly an extraordinary claim. I can see the 2,000 page thread of harassment and hate directed at a single person for myself.
The Kiwi Farms response claims that post was deleted within minutes, and the fact that someone posted on 4chan referencing a post on another site is a ridiculous reason to ban the other site.
The original justification from Cloudflare for de-platforming them which you quoted in your post was that “targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours”. That is the claim that requires evidence. Citing a post that was removed prior to that time period is not proof that threats have escalated over the last 48 hours. What evidence is there of this claim? Do you have a link you can share to the thread of harassment and hate?
> the fact that someone posted on 4chan referencing a post on another site is a ridiculous reason to ban the other site.
It really isn't. This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes. If the nexus of directed harassment and bullying was on KF -- which it was -- and then someone posts threats on 4chan which reference KF, the causal culpability for that event is largely on KF's shoulders, not 4chan's. Whoever this psycho was was most probably radicalized to action on KF.
> The Kiwi Farms response claims that post was deleted within minutes
So? You seem to be under the unjustified impression that it's only the incitement that motivated this decision, when in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.
> It really isn't. This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes.
Have you considered how many ideas have been spread this same way by sharing tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos? Why haven’t there been big campaigns to ban Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from the internet?
Do you see how preposterous it sounds? I can understand banning individual people from a forum or taking legal action if what they did could be a crime, but removing an entire forum for the actions of a small percentage of their users is crazy.
> in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.
It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site. Your original post suggested that it is unlikely Cloudflare would lie about their motivations.
If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”.
>This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes.
Has said every hand wringing censor demanding a thumb on the scale forever. This is the exact logic that led to "The Fool" being the only one capable of criticizing a monarch. Action may require censure, speech never should.
I can demonstrate that KF is acting in bad faith: To this day Kiwifarms still hosts the Christchurch video, the same video discussed in Moon’s rebuttal here.
In 2022, Moon (the author of this HN link) posted the AU Government’s takedown order along with his response: “were a US company,” refusing to remove the CC video.
You can still find it by searching for “AU Government Class 1 Security Kiwifarms”
Well it is a US company... In the US, you are allowed to possess or distribute photos from concentration camps, 9/11 footage, and yes, the Christchurch video. You don't need a special journalism license or a law enforcement badge. Many sites understandably choose not to host content like that, but it's important for some places to be willing to host primary source material. Otherwise the event will just fade from our collective consciousness, or will end up getting distorted or twisted into a conspiracy theory (eg. Holocaust denial, 9/11 truthers, crisis actors, etc).
Explain how refusing to censor content or turn over PII on a government's behalf, something which many companies due, relates to "acting in bad faith".
"Extraordinary claims" are things like "God exists", not "some imbeciles on the internet are sending death threats that don't appear to be just bluster."
People getting together on the internet to threaten others with violence is not an especially uncommon occurrence.
That is a fair point. Perhaps that was the wrong classification, but “an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life” is a pretty extreme portrayal of events without any additional evidence/context.
If anything, the fact that it is a common occurrence on the internet is a stronger argument for not de-platforming a forum for what their users post on it.
I've had people post phony bomb threats on my services in the past in an attempt to make my life more difficult. Do you think that I shouldn't be allowed to host services because I'm targeted by bad actors?
Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).
Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue. The real reason why KF was kicked off of Cloudflare is because a lot of people told Cloudflare to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.
> I've had people post phony bomb threats on my services in the past in an attempt to make my life more difficult. Do you think that I shouldn't be allowed to host services because I'm targeted by bad actors?
> Maybe we should shut down Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail et al. because they allow pseudonymous entities to say whatever they want until moderation addresses problematic posting (as Kiwifarms did with the bomb threat -- they deleted the post and banned the account of the user who made it).
This is all disanalogous. With Kiwifarms, the incitement to violence was the straw that broke the camel's back. It presumably wasn't just the incitement per se. The incitement didn't happen in a vacuum. Gmail and Yahoo don't have social mechanics that encourage this behavior. Twitter and Facebook actively ban many of the things that Kiwifarms doesn't ban, and presumably your forum does too.
> Not trying to defend Kiwifarms here but looking at this an abstracted issue.
Don't look at it as an asbtracted issue. Study the details, otherwise you will confuse yourself by trying to draw analogies between a hate forum with targeted harassment on the one hand, and an email provider on the other, which share nothing in common aside from them both being websites.
Fine then. Here we go. I now suggest a medium by which others may pseudonymously incite each other to violence by creating accounts on various services, and hosting credentials in a regular manner such that one can compose a system using arbitrary providers to host the same type of speech.
By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people." Welcome to reality. People are horrible. They have been horrible, this is not new. They will not stop being horrible. We maintain these systems in spite of them that the not horrible people may be able to achieve something they otherwise couldn't before. The problem, in my estimation, is people who are uncomfortable with other people organizing which in and of itself is the collective superpower of humanity. They would see that capability locked away, only to be approved by someone, but never taking into account that someday that ability to squelch organization may be applied to them.
I'm sorry, but no. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. The cost of Liberty is vigilance eternal. You may cower in fear at the prospect. Not everyone does.
If someone grabs your hair in a fight, you don't chop it off so they can't do it anymore. You adapt.
"By your logic, "Welp, there goes the internet because there are awful people.""
That's not my logic. You're assuming I'm an ideologue like the free speech purists. But I am a pragmatist that draws lines based on best guesses and cost benefit trade offs whenever one person's freedom infringes on another person's freedom.
I don't want to nuke YouTube not because it has no hate content. I don't want to nuke it because the proportion of hate content is sufficiently low such that its contribution to the world is largely positive. Pragmatism is the virtue, and ideological possession is the vice.
As a society, the USA has decided that mere pragmatism is insufficient for restricting speech or the closing down of platforms. It would be much simpler if we could make case-by-case decisions based on cost-benefit or risk-reward, but we don't.
I know that people wish to just cut the head off the snake, but our norms caution against that and our laws prevent governments from doing it.
If communities are formed with the sole purpose of being a haven for horrible people to further radicalise each other, it's perfectly reasonable for society's antibodies to destroy those communities.
Tech companies are not society's immune system, and if that's how you see yourself, please stop. Nor is it the case we should aspire to put ourselves into the capacity of being the instrumentality over and above what the jurisdictions we operate in demand, and even then, there's a mandate to push back some in the interests of the public.
Nor is Twitter for that matter; nor is KiwiFarms, nor is CloudFlare. P
Doesn't that same logic apply to KiwiFarms itself though? They too have historically lacked any kind of regular moderation. Isn't it valid, for the same reasons, to argue that their "moderation" in that particular case was insincere and driven by external outrage?
Honestly, it sort of strains reason to argue that KiwiFarms has been making a good faith effort to prevent things like threats of violence or targetted harassment. Other forum providers clearly have, right up to the point of being regularly accused of censorship for their efforts.
In which case, wouldn't CloudFlare be right to disbelieve KF? The real reason it seemed to be moderating was because a lot of people told their hosting providers to stop hosting it, not simply because a bad actor made a malicious post.
> Doesn't that same logic apply to KiwiFarms itself though? They too have historically lacked any kind of regular moderation.
Actually, I think there seems to be a misunderstanding of the nature of Kiwi Farms. I think people are tending to confuse it with a 4chan type forum, one that that is generally unmoderated.
Kiwi Farms has always had consistently good moderation.
Threats of violence and harassment have been instabans for a long time. Really, any attempts to interact with the subject of discussion are worthy of at least being reprimanded by moderation, if not a ban.
The site culture held by normal users (not just mods) is of a "look don't touch" approach. The people being discussed are interesting for their natural behavior on social media; it's less interesting when they're being prodded (at least not by the forum itself).
Occasionally 4chan types approach KF as if it's another imageboard, but there's some big culture clashes and they generally don't last long.
So KiwiFarms was just a site dispassionately interested in the "natural behavior" of "people on social media", and the fact that the people under discussion were almost universally subject to seemingly coordinated harrassment campaigns based almost exclusively on content and information collected on that site by the dispassionate observers is... what, just a crazy coincidence?
I'm sorry, but that's absolutely ridiculous and you know it. No one posting someone's address or geolocated data to KiwiFarms is doing so unaware of what is going to happen. At best, whatever moderation happens (I certainly didn't see much, but hey, you're the expert) exists to provide some kind of cover for the inevitable attention from law enforcement.
You know this. I know you know this. I just can't believe how many people are here on HN willing to make excuse after excuse for this site.
> the fact that the people under discussion were almost universally subject to seemingly coordinated harassment campaigns
Almost universally? I don't think I can think of a single person discussed on Kiwi Farms experiencing that.
Or, well, I take that back I can think of one person: Patrick Tomlinson. Patrick Tomlinson, all his personal faults aside, is legitimately constantly being pestered by a crowd of fans of the Opie and Anthony radio show. Originally they were on Reddit, and then migrated to their own forum. Kiwi Farms later discovered this brouhaha and started discussing it.
That's about it.
Now plenty of people have an incentive to claim they're experiencing coordinated harassment. Every social media personality since the dawn of time, whether they're being discussed on Reddit or Twitter or whatever, is massively incentivized to make up claims of harassment. Usually the kernel of truth is that they might have received maybe one rude DM from someone, which they then parlay into "harassing messages". There's never any receipts and the connection between the main group discussion and the person messaging is dubious at best. They wield this like a cudgel to shut down all criticism of their behavior.
I mean, hell, take Onision. He pulled that shtick constantly. That and DMCA abuse. And the discussions he was shutting down were (true) claims that he was grooming teenaged girls sexually. The mainstream public finally heard about Onision because of Chris Hansen's investigation. But there are dozens of Onision types out there pulling the same trick.
Kiwi Farms has always been very careful to cultivate a culture against interacting with the subjects.
Again, I think you really are imagining some kind of 4chan type scenario. That simply isn't the case.
>So they are lying when they say "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life"?
In a word, yes.
In several words, if the CEO wants to go on about due process, then he should provide it. Establish that there's an "unprecedented threat", either publicly or to Moon in private correspondence.
Also I really dislike that perception of KF required to be so negative that people are severely discounting the probability that this is a false flag attack, especially given the obvious incentives of activists to do this sort of stuff. If KF started producing material indicating that TRAs were plotting to murder Joshua Moon, would anyone take it seriously?
> discounting the probability that this is a false flag attack
There's a great kid's story (name escapes me now) about a boy who won't stop pulling the pig-tails of the girl in front of him. Every time he does, she shrieks, and the teacher reprimands him. Finally, he gets the last reprimand: if it happens again, he'll be suspended.
He returns to his desk, resolved to be better, having decided he doesn't want to be suspended.
With no known reason, the girl shrieks. He's sent home.
Moral of the story: the line is actually further away from the edge than tricksters think it is.
I am not a Kiwifarms user, but since it's now available at the new domain (and according to CF, KF is not cooperating) the threats should still be there. I cannot find them. Can you please link those threats? Otherwise this lends me to believe that the basis of Matthew Prince's sudden reversal on his "free speech" ideals was something else, not the KF content.
Unlawful content gets posted to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc. all the time. We don't deplatform all of them just because there was a window of time in which it was posted but not yet removed.
Out of curiosity, what caused targeted threats to escalate over the last 48 hours? I'm not familiar with the site, but from what I understand they've been around for over a decade doing basically the same thing, so what caused this escalation?
Keffals posted that she was going to Belfast, which caused the escalation of targeted threats, this time reported through a different more effective police service. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32712196
> "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life"
Bottom line is that somebody (foreign governments, weev) will always take whatever a site's ToS are and repeatedly ram up right against the edges of the policy until they have extracted as many lulz as possible. This is tough to deal with if you have a conscience, or need money.
What they tried at first, which is very "90s internet", is to become a bit of a troll yourself:
"We are deeply committed to the principles of free speech and will never deny a customer service to our critical infrastructure based on the content of their messages. You are banned. Now, go away, lolcow."
Reddit did something similar -- not with the /r/thefappening, but later on with /r/the_donald. Recall when /u/spez randomly edited comments left by contributors there, sending a clear message "we have no rules, and we will break you if we feel like it". The public apology ( https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/ ) conveys the subtext that it will happen again, there are no firm rules, and you are not welcome here.
I dunno quite what the plan is here going forward. weev and null are kind of an amazing force for chaos and if you can get them defensive and off kilter, that's certainly interesting.
Overall though I have found kiwifarms a helpful resource for understanding online harassment. I appreciate that members do their coordination in the open; by reading forum activity you can understanding roughly where the next massacre will happen. The community targets lulz as weakness and many of their most persistent attackers have gotten sucked in and doxxed themselves, notably in the Chris-Chan maelstrom.
The community has successfully killed people and the fact that they have a centralized repository with documentation will be helpful for the next Michelle Carter style prosecution.
Ironically, it's SomethingAwful that is credited* with rousing the press attention required for Reddit to rescind its free speech ideal (making SA chaotically the progenitor of both 4chan and r/ShitRedditSays). There too was suspicion of raiding with questionable activity from those who wanted the ban.
> We understand that this might make some of you worried about the slippery slope from banning one specific type of content to banning other types of content. We're concerned about that too, and do not make this policy change lightly or without careful deliberation. We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. (from Reddit's statement, https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/pmj7f/a_necessary_cha...)
yea...
As for generalization, a 2012 writeup on Reddit's situation cites LiveJournal's incident in 2007 and further LambdaMOO's, from 1992: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3585997
This is an interesting perspective. I was just thinking about the SA community's relationship with lowtax -- did they know what he was like for longer than the public?
If I wanted to understand this world further I'd probably call Drew Curtis. Of all the people in this space he seems to be the most levelheaded and usually seems to get what's really going on.
I feel sorry for Cloudflare's management team in having to deal with all this nonsense.
What they really want to focus on is growing their business, developing new cloud-scale technologies, and serving their customers the best they can.
Instead they've ended up stuck in this ridiculous online spat between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals.
If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.
> between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals
This is a bit too much "both sides are bad" for me. Fact is that Kiwi Farms is a horrible website where people harass others, share information about them, and drive them to suicide. That's pretty bad on its own.
Look at it from Cloudflare employees' point of view though. Do they really want to spend their time getting drawn in to any more of this trivial online drama? No, of course not. Pulling the plug is the sensible business decision.
Whether foo and bar will get married is, in my opinion, considerably different from organizations that collect and magnify hatred against members of various disempowered groups.
The problem is that if you give in once, or are perceived to give in, then not only will both sides hate you for it, but you will be under even more pressure to give in next time.
To run something like Cloudflare you probably have to have the rule that you will not block services for anyone under any circumstances unless ordered to by a court, or they advocate for a blocking campaign against you, or host content that does. In this case they would have let kf of, but block Twitter.
I don't get it. Do trans people and women and all the alleged victims "are a part of that community" that they endured years of torture and talking down leading to suicide as is being alleged or do these KF people do doxing on sorts on other sites and use KF as a central place to coordinate attacks?
I am not on 8chan. I can never be harassed by anyone in /b/ or whatever the bad that forums are.
If I am aan active part of a community, I should not claim peer pressure and influence or should I not?
...That's always going to exist. It's gone by different names. It's why you aren't supposed to share personal info on the Web, btw, because anyone can get to it, now without even leaving the comfort of home.
you know when the whole foursquare started gamification of locations, i did go into it pretty early on but some "time" later i was like "why am i doing this? for achievements?"
same for the whole gamification of your facebook profile which nudges you to give more and more info about yourself... the "connect your accounts" is terrible way of keeping watertight identities.
look. do you remember when "chatroom etiquette" meant not correctly answering a/s/l? because that would be creepy if the stranger found out and nasty things could happen?
i mean its easy to "connect" and tie everything to one identity but then that same identity means you cannot hide. its a tradeoff and one i personally am willing to give.
> If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.
Fair enough. But this CEO was blowing clouds in our face that they took this action because our legal system is not up to the task!
It's so sad that Mr. Prince apparently can't afford having a competent legal team to explain to him the concepts of "Rule of Law", "Due Process", "Courts", "Judges", "Juries", "Evidence", and all that other [quaint!] aspects of our (broken!) "traditional legal system".
If you are walking down the street, and see one person kicking the shit out of another, dial 911 to report it, and are told that the police will be there in 5 minutes, is it vigilantism to step in and break the fight up, or try to physically restrain the attacker? Given that the victim might sustain a severe or life-threatening injury in that 5 minutes?
Would stepping in be an indictment of "rule of law", "due process", "courts", "judges", "juries", "evidence", and support a claim that our traditional legal system is "broken"?
If you perceive an imminent threat to a third party, and have reason to believe that it might take the police too long to respond (simply because they can't be everywhere, all at once, and if they turn up ASAP guns blazing then that's how you get SWATting), do you think a good citizen should just look on and conclude that said third party is just having the worst day today, and it's a shame nobody could have prevented it?
Was that person getting physically kicked the shit out of?
I see exchanges of meta-information, recognized by courts of law to be public, and hear nothing of actual physical violence.
You do not, however go, and put someone in a sleeper hold, or call a construction company to come pull out the chunk of sidewalk a fight is occurring on. Also, if you have someone going and publically antagonizing another group, the general approach is inform LE, and caution the one on the receiving end to keep their head down.
If all they do is make themself more of a target, no amount of legal system or police force will protect them. If they scale their being a target beyond their capability to defend themselves from those that would target them, well... Society tends to self-correct through violence, in case you hadn't noticed. Learning "where thine chicanery will not be tolerated" is kinda part of the whole surviving in civilization shtick.
Mind, I've been on the recieving end of that Good Samaritanism. I pay it forward every chance I get. If you think I didn't learn to take care of myself better though, you're barking up the wrong tree.
I don't get it. Why does Prince require a legal team to explain to him the rule of law? Everything he has done in this matter has been within the letter of the law.
"A little bit geek, wonk, and nerd. Repeat entrepreneur, recovering lawyer and former ski instructor. CEO & co-founder of CloudFlare."
And oh my God. He is "recovering lawyer".
This is what he concluded with:
"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government."
So this exactly the reasoning of those (bad? good?) cops that beat suspects in alley, or conduct search on private property without a warrant.
And this cop then turns around and says:
"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than your civil rights"
The term for this type of action is Extrajudicial -- possibly our recovering lawyer remembers that from law school.
To repeat, Cloudflare has every right (afaik) to just say "bad client, we don't want you". This CEO however chose to frame this as some sort of civic virtuous action necessitated by alleged failings of our "traditional legal systems".
The statements made by any company representative responding to PR crisis shouldn't be taken as the unvarnished truth. The purpose is reputation management, dampening negative publicity before it overwhelms, while hopefully minimising long-term reputational damage.
They did it because of the cesspit environment inside every American corporation. If the CEO doesn't cave in under sufficient pressure, his internal political rivals will extend the guilt of association to him personally, and he will lose his position.
This is a modern-day equivalent of lynch mobs that has nothing to do with reason, good intentions or due process.
To be fair to CloudFlare, their entire business model is dependent on the US regulatory environment and section 230 protections. If there's a credible threat from Congress along the lines of "if the internet won't self-regulate, we'll have to do it for them", it's existential to their business.
How do you differentiate between "if enough people demand it on Twitter" and "if our consciences demand that we act"? I agree that they don't seem to be adhering to the policy that they published just last week, but a company that didn't care passionately about free speech wouldn't have published what they did. It was clearly going to offend a lot of people on Twitter.
On the other hand, they clearly don't want their company to be used to kill anyone. Even if they are wrong that there is an "emergency", it seems likely they believe that there is one. Isn't a more plausible explanation that they truly believe free speech is important, but that it's not the only deciding factor?
>Come on. Shouting “fire!” In a crowded room is not free speech and no company in their right mind should support that
Actually, shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater IS explicitly free speech in America, and in fact, the idea that it's not is a layman's mistake (or a wives tale if you prefer) that is corrected in basically freshman legal classes.
In modern legal discussion, the idea of "fire in a theater!" is basically an immediate identifier that you are not educated in this part of the law at all and your opinion is low quality.
Not trying to insult you here, I too have used this very analogy on the internet in the past, just laying out what exactly others see when they see what you wrote.
>Shouting “fire!” In a crowded room is not free speech
stop using this dumb analogy. it was invented to justify prosecuting people for speaking out against the draft, and it was later denounced by the very person who coined it.
in this case it's more like: a random person who never went to the theatre before shouted fire in the theatre, the person was summarily booted from the premises and banned by the theatre staff. then later on the police come by and shut down the theatre because they hosted fire-shouters.
You lack the imagination to think of alternative possibilities other than they're lying?