The National
Broadcasting Council

‘Protecting children and young people from content that could negatively affect their development is one of the fundamental duties of media service providers. Material containing aggression and vulgar language requires not only proper labelling, but also effective safeguards restricting access by minors. Audiences, and young people in particular, must be guaranteed a genuine level of protection, because the regulations are not just declarations on paper’, stressed the KRRiT Chair, Dr Agnieszka Glapiak.

The investigation found that recordings of press conferences ahead of the PRIME MMA gala, published on YouTube, contained numerous instances of verbal and physical aggression that were not justified by the sporting nature of the event.

Conference participants and people appearing in the material engaged in vulgar abuse, threats, provocation and aggressive behaviour, often presented in an approving context. There was an accumulation of words and phrases widely regarded as offensive, and a social normalising of vulgarity and social pathologies, including psychological and physical violence.

The recordings were publicly available, and watching them required no login or age verification. Importantly, the content had not been correctly classified as intended solely for viewers over the age of 18, nor labelled with a symbol indicating the presence of vulgar language.

Under the Broadcasting Act, providers of on-demand audiovisual media services are required to label content appropriately and to apply effective measures protecting minors from access to material that could negatively affect their development. Given the nature and scale of the breaches, they could not be regarded as marginal.