Of course that is a ridiculous scenario, as are most straw man arguments.
And the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" trope was original made in support to argue for censorship of speech opposing the draft during WWI so if anything it's an example for why we should absolutely defend free speech even if there are seeming arguments to restrict it. The better solution to prevent stampedes in crowded spaces is to have safety regulation requiring adequate exits and occupancy limits, which we do have. Movie theaters are also not public spaces so they can easily ban people for causing a disturbance.
It is the case that unless you are a polymath with copious amount of time and money, you will never be able to accumulate sufficient information to make fully educated decisions in a world truly devoid of censorship.
By fully educated I mean starting from the bottom up and going all the way through to reach a conclusion.
This means that every single resource you will use has to be verified, all experiments need to be conducted and evaluated.
If we don’t censor anything, then there is no point in books because editors are censoring information there.
What’s the point of journals and publications without a review process to filter out the garbage?
You could very well be a reasonable person, but without censorship to varying degrees your capacity filter garbage is hindered by simply not knowing anything to a reasonable degree of certainty exactly because no form of censorship exists. Thus your capacity to limit information based on prior knowledge is hindered as there is not an authority of any kind that you may trust exactly because there is no way to measure quality of one’s speech outside the scrutiny it passes through through established channels and authorities that already have a reputation and we may trust.
The reason we do censorship is because not all speech is benevolent, useful, or true. People will abuse the absence of censorship to attack “unwanted” people, to push lies, to misrepresent information, and to push an agenda instead of letting facts do the talking.
Why is it difficult for facts to do the talking?
> Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. It states that "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."[1][2]
Now, the more bullshit that floats the more bullshit propagates and thus the less true information exists, eventually suffocating us in information garbage.
If you wish to see this in action, look into antivax groups convinced that vaccinated individuals will start dropping like flies within the next $LATEST_GOALPOST.
Or, take a look at how long it took me to explain why absolute absence of censorship simply does not work just from a view of having a consistent world model and having nobody to trust and no way of doing so.
One could extend my comment to include damage done to people or entities intentionally or otherwise. Notice how Musk pivoted out of absolute free speech when advertisers left?
The latency on information coming from a newspaper or even TV news is limited to how rapidly those sources can vet the information before publishing it, and then the latency of the publication method. If someone wants to use those avenues to spread misinformation, they have to do a lot of legwork to make the lie sound plausible enough that the publisher will put the effort into publishing it.
What's the legwork for someone planning to spread misinformation via twitter? How long does it take "for new facts to emerge" that address the misgivings incredulous consumers hold? The power of social media is that the real truth can emerge very quickly, regardless of what the powers that be want. But the threat of social media is that there's basically no organic way to prevent abuse of that power.
Others are right that the line between misinformation and difference of opinion is often quite narrow. But I don't believe there is no difference, and every society must choose and hold its line, according to its own values.
