If watching a crime is a criminal offence, you better lock up the viewers of CNN, Fox News, and the BBC.
I do think their ought to be laws against the distribution of this kind of material (there probably are?), and there is no question that producing it is a criminal offence, and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Watching a report about a crime is not the same as consuming a product that was produced and shared or sold by the criminal that committed the crime. You are actively supporting the criminal, either through money or through community.
On a different note: There is nothing wrong with regulating how footage of crimes can be shown to protect the victims and even the offenders. I know this argument is hard to make on HN, because free speech, but I think privacy is an important right, too.
ISIS produces their beheading videos specifically for them to be shared and viewed by as many people as possible. By watching these videos, you are actively supporting ISIS by paying any attention to what they are doing and therefore granting them legitimacy. If videos of rape are illegal,then videos of murder should be too.
> There is nothing wrong with regulating how footage of crimes can be shown to protect the victims and even the offenders.
Right! That's how it starts. In the end we have "there's nothing wrong with censoring 28 pages of a 9/11 report to protect the security of all Americans because it doesn't really matter who funded it, the government told us who the bad people are so we don't really need to keep the government on check on this".
That sort of thinking ends really well. /s
Remember, the citizens hire the government. They work for us. Would you allow your employees to censor some parts of your financial reports?
Grow some principles. If people are sick that they need to look at sick images then offer to help them. Enabling tyrants does not help keep children safe. Incidentally, not spanking them does. If you really care about protecting children, get off your bureaucrat high horse and start helping educate people on the impact of spanking.
The "this is how it starts"-narrative is not necessarily true. While Germany has strict privacy rules for victims and criminals - media cannot show their faces or their last names and so on - I do not see that it is the country that has problems with its agencies and military-industrial complex being out of control and censoring stuff on their behalf.
If there were photos of me being raped as a kid I would want to see the rapist get punished and like-minded people forbidden to watch them. I do not think that it is moral to hurt people in concrete cases because of an abstract (debatable) threat to the values of a society. What do these values even mean if you do not have the mercy to grant victims this right?
You can still inform people about the crime without showing the victims face or the actual explicit imagery.
> You can still inform people about the crime without showing the victims face or the actual explicit imagery.
Let's say society makes a fund for people that were abused as kids (horribile dictu). Those funds are there only to benefit those people so we'd better be able to prove they were really victims of what they say there were, otherwise people can just say "yeah that happened to me" and collect the money without ever proving they were victims.
You may want to forbid people from seeing the evidence for your abuse but then you can't expect people to believe you. When we believe in tales of rape without proof we smear the name of the accused.
I do think their ought to be laws against the distribution of this kind of material (there probably are?), and there is no question that producing it is a criminal offence, and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.