It would be pretty messed up if the punishment came before the crime.

My point, in this case is that the crime has been ongoing. Bullying and harassment aren’t new. What’s new is that we now have a lot of it recorded. This gives us an unprecedented ability to prosecute a class of crimes that people have been committing with impunity.

The biggest downside is that it would likely be short-lived. If there were a bunch of headlines about people getting giant civil judgements, bullies would probably learn to be more careful about generating evidence of their crimes.

That would likely initially focus on attempting to hide the videos from the general public but I suspect they would eventually learn that doesn’t work; courts can compel discovery. They would probably also try to modify their on-screen behavior so it doesn’t technically qualify as a crime but I expect they would mostly fail at that.

That said there would likely always be some cohort of dumb criminals who continue to record their misdeeds. We still see cases where people discuss their crimes over unencrypted email and we still see cases of criminals taking selfies with their crimes

Sort of.

I am making an assumption that there are some people who are likely highly motivated to take action. Parents often care about bullying of their own children, even when the rest of the school doesn’t. We wouldn’t need all parents to care, just a few of them.
I’m not assuming that lawyers are generally willing to work for free but I do assume that they like money and are willing to take cases on contingency, if they think the case is strong enough.
I’m also going on my understanding that video evidence tends to be fairly strong and that this translates into a higher probability of a favorable judgement with less work on the lawyer’s part.

So it’s less that I’m making an assumption than that I’m asking where the gap in the above reasoning chain lies.

Can someone explain why this isn’t actually a solution to an old problem? We used to have issues with various forms of harassment that were not addressed because they relied on unreliable testimony. Now we actually have people creating hard evidence of their actions.

The behaviors described in this article are banned in every school I or my children have ever attended. How difficult would it be for the parents of any of these victims to hire a lawyer to absolutely wipe the floor with these people? Don’t these videos basically put the perpetrators heads on silver platters?

The average Windows users isn’t making the OS decision at all. They’re told by their boss that the company uses Windows and they’re given a Windows laptop.

When they get that laptop they sign something with fine print that tells them not to mess with the OS or they’ll get fired.

How do those suckers support themselves or their families when they get fired for violating the corporate IT policy?

Sure. We’d have to adapt the conspiracy theory a bit to make it believable.

I’d like to propose one that also explains the suspicious abundance of banks and real estate offices. They were secretly funded by alien pedophile cabals so they could spy on the populace and mind control them. The initial alien expeditionary forces mistakenly reported back that bankers and real estate agents are the most beloved people on earth so they thought it would be the perfect disguise.