Poland to jail online streamers of violent crimes and cruelty for up to 5 years

tencentshill

Why punish the act of recording? If they're stupid enough to film themselves committing a crime, don't get in the way.

JuniperMesos

My biggest concern with this law is that it will be used to bring charges against bystanders who film violent crimes in public and thereby publicize those crimes, when people in positions of power over the Polish criminal justice system would prefer not to do so. Obviously, one salient example of this kind of thing is people who film nonwhite immigrants in Europe committing violent crimes. The anti-immigrant political agitation currently happening in Belfast was sparked by the viral promulgation of cell phone video of a Sudanese asylum-seeker slitting the throat of a random white person (video footage that is actually already difficult to find in its original form by searching); if a law existed that would allow the state to jail "online streamers of violent crimes and cruelty", I have no doubt that many people within European criminal justice systems would attempt to use that law against the bystanders who originally took the footage and/or promulgated the footage, in order to try to prevent the kind of public unrest that is currently happening in Belfast.