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Today on the 11th of June, the Department of Justice - through Junior State Attorney Mypen - submitted a criminal complaint against ex-Senator Notcom. The complaint accused the defendant of Hate Speech (Article 56a of the Criminal Code) and ToS Violation (Article 64 of the Criminal Code), for telling another user to “kys” in voice chat and for saying multiple slurs in the aforementioned voice chat.
The chargeability of crimes committed in voice chats is an interesting and complex legal question. While of course calling another user slurs is always considered Hate Speech, actually proving something like this without being able to simply make a screenshot is hard. The only real way to get the Judge to believe you, as a state attorney, in such a case is to get the witnesses to sign an affidavit confirming that they had indeed heard the defendant commit crimes. This usually is somewhat easily counterable by the defence though, with the court in most cases simply relying on who seems more trustworthy.
Another option would be to use the Scriptly Transcription bot, which transcribes all words said in voice chat in text format. This bot is highly volatile though and often makes mistakes. Furthermore, it can simply be turned off by anyone in the voice chat, so relying on it when trying to catch someone in the act is rather hard.
Department of Justice employee Ferris actually tried to fix the aforementioned issue at the end of June by proposing the “Voice Chat Notes Amendment” bill to the Senate, which would make kicking the transcript bot a crime in and of itself, in order to prevent situations like these from happening. The bill was heavily criticized by the Senate though, with the Senators arguing that it would be a violation of privacy and thus unethical.
Then-Senator Notcom (the one who is being charged for something she did in a voice chat right now) commented the following on the issue in a Senate debate:
“I think transcription in general is bad, and making it illegal to get rid of is downright unconstitutional”
The bill’s author, on the other hand, argued that the transcription would only be sent to a private channel accessible to law enforcement officers and state attorneys only. This was countered by the argument that about half the server’s active population was either serving as a law enforcement officer or state attorney.
In the end, the bill did not pass due to the Senators’ aforementioned privacy concerns. If this was a good decision in the end might be a question that will be answered in the proceedings against Notcom for crimes committed in voice chat.