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Supreme Court to weigh whether Covid misinformation is protected speech
(www.statnews.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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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.
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.