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Comment by zoklet-enjoyer | Hacker News Reader

Murder and rape pictures and videos should be illegal

Should the viewing of a murder be illegal or the murder itself or both?

Should the reason we view change what should be viewed? If someone is viewing for pleasure is that a crime, if someone is viewing for healing does that change how we treat them?

Is someone's dead a privacy issue? Should deaths be personal and viewing such an act break privacy laws?

What about fake murder and rape pictures? What about newsworthy pictures/video?

Should we shield society from its negative elements or normalize them?

Only the murder itself should be illegal. If it's some kind of weird pornography, for example, then the filming and distribution of it could be illegal.

If we try to prosecute whether it's viewed for pleasure or not, then we are trying to prosecute thought crimes. We are trying to prosecute someone's state of mind there.

No, just viewing someone's death does not violate privacy laws, in my opinion. But if you share the material with others, than it might be right to make that illegal, in my opinion.

We should take such material down, but nobody should ever see jail time or any form of punishment for viewing or reading anything, in a free society. Any situation otherwise is a hallmark of a police state, and it shows how far the Overton window has shifted. How much the frog has boiled over the years.

And seeing the harm caused by the War on Drugs and countless other cases of overcriminalization, it may well be we are living in a de-facto police state, and unaware of it. We've internalized and accepted loss of our fundamental liberties over the years. And this trend started roughly around 1980 or so.

So the person who posted george Floyd's murder should be punished under your system?

No, it only applies to material produced as a type of pornography, for example. I've reworded the post to make it clearer.

Exactly. Cartel and ISIS style murder videos and live streams like the Christchurch and Buffalo massacres should be treated the same as child porn.

The creation of those videos are crimes and the distribution and possession should be too. Videos like George Floyd and JFK are recorded by bystanders and are evidence of crimes.

…so if someone recorded the buffalo massacre as a bystander then it’s evidence and ok?

Slippery slope

How is that a slippery slope? It's dry, level ground. Did the person filming participate in the murder? Nope. They are documenting evidence of a crime.

yea this is a terrible idea. I think of the Zapruder film.

Yes, to distribute, if produced for malicious reasons, but not to view. I personally believe that no part of the internet, if viewed or visited, should be illegal to browse, period. Everyone should be free to explore the entire Internet without any fear of prosecution, and encouraged to report illegal material so that it can be taken down promptly. As long you don't hack into anything, all of it should be legal to access.

I ended my career over this. I do not want to work in any industry that supports directly or indirectly the prosecution of such "thought crimes". Such prosecution has no place in a free society.

I will not work on any software (or hardware) which provides a traceability or logging facility that can be used to prosecute people for viewing or reading anything. Therefore participation in development of networking equipment is completely out of the question for me. To me it's no different from developing weapons systems, another thing I will not do.

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