The government is toughening its approach towards patostreamers. MEPs announce an expansion of the catalog of penalties
Listening to the voices of experts, we have planned amendments to the draft law criminalizing patostreaming, said Paweł Bliźniuk, MP of the Civic Coalition, in the PAP Studio. He added that the planned changes will include, among others: expanding the catalog of acts that will be prohibited from streaming.
The Parliament is working on regulations banning patostreaming, i.e. recording and publishing or broadcasting live materials that present vulgar, obscene, shocking or brutal content.
Paweł Bliźniuk, an MP from the Civic Coalition, emphasized in the PAP Studio that the very fact of transmitting and reporting specific content via the Internet is to be punished.
The project, which Bliźniuk prepared in cooperation with Monika Rosa, assumes that the online distribution of, among others, content presenting a crime against life or health, freedom, sexual freedom or decency, if it is punishable by more than five years of imprisonment.
Criminal lawyer Natalia Daśko from the Department of Criminal Law of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń noted that such a specific catalog of prohibited acts in practice will cover only two crimes: murder and aggravated rape.
The MP commented on her words and explained that the proposed regulations were intended to be “the beginning of a certain discussion”, and Daśko's voice would be included in the amendment that would be submitted during Tuesday's work on the project in the committee.
– We listen to these voices, experts, to the voices of people who are specialists in this field. (…) We are open to these observations and we have prepared (…) one amendment that will consume many of these votes – he said.
He admitted that the initially proposed catalog was conservative and should be expanded. – It seems to us that the matter is obvious, but if we look at the community on the Internet, this thread is absolutely controversial. We wanted to start with a certain range of prohibited acts that would be punishable by streaming. However, there are voices, and indeed they are not isolated, that encourage us to submit specific amendments today, working on this project in the subcommittee, he explained.
When asked about actions that are not criminalized and which are often pathological elements – such as drinking alcohol or using profanity – he emphasized that a lot depends on conventions or the individual level of sensitivity, but it seems that they should also be subject to sanctions.
The Office of Electronic Communications conducted in September last year consumer survey of people aged 7 to 17, according to which over a quarter (27.8%) of children and adolescents admitted to watching patostreaming. The largest percentage of recipients are people aged 10-12 (34.1%) and people between 7 and 9 years old (30.6%). According to the study, 34.5% of people paid for access to pathostreams at least once. minors.
However, according to the MP, the scale of popularity of pathostremes may be much greater, because many young people may not want to admit to reaching for this type of content, considering it something shameful.
– What's more, I bet that many people are unable to distinguish a pathostream from a normal stream and for some, certain behaviors are the norm, due to the fact that they encounter these attitudes and behaviors every day on the Internet and the boundary is shifting, (…) acceptance of what (…) – in the opinion of the entire society – is not normal – said Bliźniuk.
Interview by Katarzyna Czarnecka (PAP)
ksc/mark/
