Personality rights

Personality rights and image rights are censorship that protects misbehaving people from being held accountable.

Like copyrights, "personality rights" and "image rights", also known as "rights to ones own image" and "rights to ones own likeness", are worded as "rights" that make them seem beneficial to the individual. In reality, they take away much more than they give. For example, they prevent cheating women and misbehaving teachers and other authority figures from being exposed.

Video cameras are among the most effective tools for exposing corruption. This is why their use had to be restricted by law and people had to be fooled into embracing censorship under the blanket of "personality rights".

"Personality rights" also prevent the preservation of historical events. By today's standards, most photographs ever taken in public violated someone's personality rights, but it never mattered.

This is a photograph from the 1960s (source). By today's standards, these people were all "violated".

Another bunch of "violated" people. (source)

Obviously, you can't leverage "personality rights" against your superiors. The state will still happily surveil you through their CCTV cameras and record all your calls without your consent.

"Personality rights" protect bad actors

So-called "personality rights" prevent bad actors from being held to account.

For example, some teachers behave badly to their students, for example by shouting and humiliating students, throwing chalk at students, or physically forcing a student out of the class room after harmless drinking of water. People outside the classroom such as parents and the school principal might not believe students that describe how their teachers behaved.

So-called "personality rights" prevent other students from picking up their smartphone video cameras and filming the teacher and then publishing the video online with the real name of the teacher. Therefore, teachers don't have to fear consequences while misbehaving towards students. Their abuses stay in the dark. If it wasn't filmed, it's like it didn't happen.

One would say "this is wrong because it would hurt the reputation of the teacher". In fact, German law cites protecting individuals' reputations as a reason for its personality rights. However, a person who misuses their position of authority deserves to have their reputation damaged. The whole point of a reputation is knowing whether you can trust someone. Therefore, teachers who think their bad behaviour is justified shouldn't mind having that behaviour on public record. After all, they carry a responsibility while brainwashing educating children of the next generation and need to be held to a high standard.

"Personality rights" also protect unloyal cheating women from being exposed online. While women are free to slander men as rapists publicly and will be automatically believed, men are not allowed to expose women. In places where "personality rights" are weaker or culturally not accepted, cheating women can be exposed.

Personality rights were also leveraged by speedrun cheater Billy Mitchell to punish Benjamin Smith (who ran the YouTube channel "Apollo Legend") for using video and audio recordings from a public event he attended to expose his corruption, and competing Pac-Man player David W. Race for recording telephone calls he participated in. To David Race's luck, he lives in a US state where recording phone calls without the other participant's consent is legal. Otherwise, it would have been more difficult for him to expose Mitchell's corruption.

How the media fooled Germans into happily accepting censorship

While Americans understand the importance of being able to hold their public government workers accountable using video cameras, Germans got fooled into happily accepting censorship under the blanket of "personality rights" and "rights to ones own image".

So how did it all start?

People in authority grew sick of being held accountable for their public actions by plebians and their video cameras, so in April 2016, the police department of Hagen kickstarted a campaign to smear those who film authority people such as police officers as so-called "gawkers" and "sensationalists", through a Facebook post titled "Schämt euch, ihr Gaffer vom Hauptbahnhof", which traslates into "Shame on you, you gawkers from the train station!"

In the days following the post, major German news outlets magically picked up on it and publicized it.

• Hagen: „Schämt euch, ihr Gaffer“ – RP Online
• Hagener Polizei schimpft über Schaulustige – N-TV
• Hier stören Hunderte Gaffer eine Rettung - Polizei: "Schämt Euch!" – TAZ
• "Schämt Euch, ihr Gaffer vom Hauptbahnhof!" – Bayern3
• "Schämt Euch!": Polizei schimpft bei Facebook über Gaffer – Augsburger Allgemeine
• Polizei schimpft bei Facebook über Gaffer: „Schämt Euch!“ – Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung

The comments on the Facebook post are full of sheeple people agreeing that officers should be protected by so-called "personality rights" while performing a public service, especially from a position of authority. These commenters didn't consider the possibility of officers misusing their powers, for example by forcing people to suffocate themselves wear masks or get poisoned vaccinated. One can safely assume that all disagreeing comments were quietly swept under the rug.

It is the same thing that happened four years after that during the plandemic:

In today's culture of copy-and-paste journalism, it is common for hundreds of unrelated outlets to feature the exact same reports. This is not the result of laziness. This is by design.

When we see identical headlines across seemingly unrelated platforms, the logical mind concludes "well then, it must be true".

The illusion that numerous news sources have arrived at the same conclusion gives us confidence to share the chosen narrative.

And just like that, we become the unwitting pushers of propaganda.

(From "Plandemic 2 | INDOCTORNATION", at 15:53.)

But that wasn't enough yet. In late 2017, the state-owned bank sponsored the production of an emotionally fueled propaganda film titled "Schaulustige - Sei kein Gaffer" ("sensationalists - don't be a gawker"). Besides the million views on YouTube, the film was broadcast on mainstream television. The film implies that any harmless distant filming of crash sites will escalate to people stepping on the crash site and entering fire trucks to take pictures with the helmets left behind by the firefighters.

The propaganda movie shifted the culture in a way that makes filming officers in public less culturally accepted anywhere, not only on crash sites.

In 2021, the new law specifically punishing the photography and filming of crash sites came into effect, allegedly to protect dead people. The law is worded in a way that implies it only applies to crash sites with dead people. Given that dead people usually exist on a crash site, this effectively outlaws photographing or filming near any crash sites. As if dead people care in the slightest about appearing on photographs.

See also

• Police brutality
• DMCA