Actually, You Can Yell "Fire" In A Crowded Theatre

On August 11th, 1911, during a performance at Pennsylvania’s Canonsburg Opera House, a member of the audience misinterpreted a flash from a malfunctioning projector and shouted "Fire!" in the crowded theatre. Twenty-six people died in the resulting stampede.

Two years later, a similar false alarm at a Christmas party in Michigan killed seventy-three. 

And on September 19th, 1902, a hundred people were crushed to death when a member of the Shiloh Baptist choir shouted “There’s a fight!” and the congregation thought he said, “There’s a fire.”

I don't know if it was boredom or malice or the paranoia created by ubiquitous oil lamps and wooden buildings, but fire-related stampedes were common enough in the early 1900s that several jurisdictions passed laws designed to prevent them. 

And then, in 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. immortalised them in his oft-misquoted opinion from Schenck v. United States:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

(Emphasis mine.)

Contrary to popular opinion, you can yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. But if you do so falsely, if your lies cause a panic, if people die as a result, you still have to face the consequences. 

Imagine if, out of the blue, a child developed telepathic powers. If he could push a thought into the minds of millions of people from anywhere in the world, as often as he liked. 

Imagine if he could do this without revealing who he was or whether he was being paid to support a particular agenda.

Most importantly, imagine that this child is just the worst. 

This is the kind of child who will shout, “Fire!” hoping that it causes a panic, who enjoys flooding his surroundings with noise until nobody can think straight, who is so desperate for attention he'll do or say anything to keep everybody’s eyes on him.

What should we do with this child? Do we figure out a way to protect people from his intrusive thoughts? Do we create incentives that reward him when he uses his power responsibly and punish him when he doesn't? Would these questions become more urgent if there were a hundred or a thousand such children? Or if they were being weaponised by a potentially hostile nation? 

Most people have no problem recognising that even if our telepathic toddler were the most well-behaved, conscientious person on Earth, there are a million and two ways his powers could wreak havoc. 

They'd understand that even while telepathy is superficially similar to speech--an idea passing from one mind to another--the scale and range of his ability means we need to think more carefully.

Yet frustratingly enough, some people struggle to recognise these dangers in the near-identical case of social media.

Today, anybody with an internet connection and the desire to pay the richest man on Earth $8 a month, can anonymously push their thoughts into millions of minds as often as they like. 

Foreign governments use this same power to radicalise any conspiracy theorists that people like Tenet Media and Tucker Carlson haven't managed to radicalise.  

And while we’re all pretending that this is harmless, shouting-fire-in-a-theatre fun, bored, insecure billionaires get to push racist and anti-immigrant propaganda into the minds of hundreds of millions of followers. Fake doctors spread panic-inducing rumours during a global pandemic. Soulless, attention-starved grifters convince millions of morons that a school shooting that killed twenty elementary school children never happened. Amoral politicians convince their fans that the election that they're trying to steal was “stolen.”

But this doesn't just cause a stampede, it inspires sociopaths to live stream themselves murdering innocent people because their skin is the wrong colour. It makes millions of people so terrified of vaccines that diseases like polio and measles, diseases that we'd all but eradicated, start to make a comeback. It turns ordinary people's brains so inside-out with hate that they try to burn down a hotel because there are immigrant women and children are inside.

It inspires people to send such an avalanche of hate and death threats to the grieving parents of those elementary school children that they're forced to go into hiding. It drives voters to smear their faeces on the walls of the Capitol building as they call for the execution of the Vice President.

Yes, there are legitimate concerns about censorship and cancel culture and government overreach. There's plenty of room to disagree about how to navigate this brave new world. But one thing's for sure: laws written by people who'd never even heard of a retweet aren't going to cut it. 

When most people think about free speech, they think about themselves. 

They worry about having their lives ruined for wrongthink. They think about reporters being fired for criticising politicians. They think about whistleblowers, jailed for telling the truth. 

And until around twenty years ago, this was all they needed to think about. 

For almost all of human history, for nearly every human being, the maximum area of influence has been a few hundred people. Almost every dumb thing we've ever said has been carried away by the wind. And anyone who said something particularly hateful or stupid or dishonest usually suffered reputational damage that decreased their field of influence.

But social media isn't like that at all.

On social media, lies get shared with millions of people before the truth has time to log on. Users are trained to never let the truth get in the way of good meme. There's no penalty for lying or getting important facts wrong or being exposed as a two-faced, duplicitous hack. In fact, these attributes are often rewarded.

So yes, people should be free to say what they want. Lies about fires, conspiracy theories about school shootings, unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, fine. But if those lies trigger a fatal stampede or death threats against grieving parents or an attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government, shouldn’t we all want to make sure they face consequences?

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