After what happened in Newry yesterday, I think it’s long past time this was made illegal.

Someone took pictures of a RTC victim and spread them around online. That poor man’s last moments have been turned into something for people to gawk at and forward on. It’s absolutely vile, and it happens far too often here and across the water.

There needs to be a law that makes it a criminal offence to take or share images of victims of serious accidents or incidents. No family should ever have to find out their loved one’s been killed because a photo of them was doing the rounds on WhatsApp.

If you agree, there’s a petition calling for it to be criminalised — please sign it and share it. Maybe if enough of us shout about it, something will actually change.

It’s basic respect, not censorship. These are human beings, not content.

https://www.change.org/p/caoimhé-s-law-stop-exploiting-trauma-it-s-not-your-story-to-tell?source_location=psf_petitions

by SometimesCriminal

8 comments

  1. I get the sentiment, but there is no way this can be effectively policed.

  2. You cannot legislate or apply technical solutions to an entirely human issue 

    You do not punish the majority to get at a ghoulish fraction of them 

  3. Giving the state even more power to censor information is not the answer.

  4. I wrote and posted something relating to this topic a number of weeks ago (it was removed).

    We already have laws against the worst of the worst – snuff material, category one imagery, the kind of thing that no sane person could defend..

    But what about the grey zone, the ghoulish swap-shop of tragedy as entertainment? Because if you have not noticed, there is a booming cottage industry in turning other people’s agony into an after-dinner chuckle.

    Everywhere you look, it is videos of mangled bodies, grief-stricken strangers, and tragedies in real-time, passed around like they were naughty memes. “Content” they call it. Let’s be honest though.. it is misery porn.

    And the dealers are usually, surprise, surprise, men. Men who once collected Panini stickers, now swapping clips of dead kids and flaming car crashes with the same boyish glee. Except it is not boyish, it is grotesque.

    What is really sick is the way it is dressed up as edgy. As though being the first to circulate footage of some poor sod’s final breath makes you a rebel rather than a ghoul. It is infantile, it is cowardly, and it is corrosive. The very idea of humanity gets chipped away, pixel by pixel, as suffering becomes a spectator sport.

    We fine people for littering. We caution them for being drunk and disorderly. Yet we let this carnival of cruelty roll on as though it is just another form of freedom of expression. Bollocks. There is nothing expressive about gawking at someone else’s horror, unless you count expressing your own moral bankruptcy.

    What we need is a cultural clampdown: fines, warnings, naming and shaming. Not because it will eliminate the appetite, morbid curiosity is as old as time, but because it will finally call it out. This is not edgy. It is not underground. It is pathetic. It is sad little boys feeling big because they can stomach watching someone else’s end.

    And maybe that is the sharpest tragedy of all, really ?

    Not the content itself, but the pitiful culture that celebrates consuming it.

    A culture of ghouls that deserves to be dragged, blinking, out of the shadows and told exactly what it is: vile, vacant, and in desperate need of growing up.

  5. This is not a criminal issue. It’s a moral one.

    People love speculation, you advocate a law against it and be so blind to refuse any link to censorship

  7. I have signed.

    I don’t think it’s censorship in itself. I do think it should be criminalised in the same way that the likes of revenge porn etc should be.

  8. Agree with the sentiment but censorship is never the answer. Plus you’re talking about a world where, as of June this year, there are people who can vote and drink legally who never lived in a world without the iPhone. How you explain to those people that the law of the land supersedes the law of the jungle they were raised with… I dunno.

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