Men find yet another way to film and harass women without consent, this time, using a remote controlled robot to push against a “16-year-old girl’s buttocks”, and this is how the most well-resourced news agencies cover it:
The English coverage by even well-resourced outlets like CNN, CBC, and the BBC have almost no information beyond the police press release, which is lazy and stupid, because it is possible to figure out everything that happened here with three seconds of clicking around the internet. The Associated Press wrote that the entire phenomenon is “new territory” for the police, which, I’m sorry to say, men using tech to harass women on livestreams in 2026 is not “unusual” or “new territory” and hasn’t been for many years.
The Cologne Police did not exactly help matters by issuing a short press release that treats the robot as mysterious and the evidence as “unusual.”
With a small amount of Googling and/or clicking around social media, it is easy to find out everything you would ever need to know.
In his statement video, Agaamuza says that the robot simply ran into the girl and didn’t grope her. The robot certainly did run into her, the whole thing was harassing and annoying; in the United States, these sorts of things happen on Twitch constantly, generally with no consequences.
Context via Bluesky
Like… are you fucking kidding me??
I personally saw one of these clankers dancing on the street in a popular entertainment district near me last weekend and they’re very obviously controlled by someone near by. People stop and watch, pose for photos, and the operator talks to people.
The way people use these to normalize AI interaction in society to where casual observers just think these are autonomous… it’s up there with people being duped into believing you can torture a glorified auto correct script.
There are two immediate plausible reasons for a statement like that. First, because statements are preliminary, so while it might be obvious to you, someone into tech, that the robot is remote controlled, and also obvious to anyone who’s done ten seconds of googling, the statement is probably written by someone who isn’t into tech and hasn’t done ten seconds of googling yet! That would, in fact, be investigation.
But secondly because there’s a big legal difference between “he deliberately made the robot grab my arse” and “I just walked the robot around and it malfunctioned and touched her arse.” Even if the robot is generally being directly controlled and that’s what the police understand, can they charge the person controlling it with assault, or is there a high likelihood it went wrong?
When the police just decide things without investigating you get American police outcomes.