A government minister has urged social media companies to “step up” and remove “content that celebrates dangerous driving”, after recent fatal collisions caused by young people driving on the wrong side of the road.
Seven people died in the early hours of Saturday morning when a Volkswagen Passat, containing five young men, sped the wrong way down the A66 near Middlesbrough and crashed into a police armed response vehicle. Last weekend, five teenagers were killed when their BMW, heading the wrong way down the M9 near Dublin, hit another car head-on, seriously injuring three women and a child.
“What makes this reckless behaviour even more appalling is that, in some cases, it is being done for social media likes,” said Justin Kelly, head of the Irish police force.
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How big a problem is it?
One of the young men killed in the Passat seems to have previously shared TikTok videos of himself in a car chase with the police. And other social media accounts linked to the car’s passengers “appeared to show men in balaclavas on motorbikes and previous police chases set to rap music,” said The Times. Hundreds of videos “shot in the UK” are being “posted online to encourage young drivers to act recklessly for kudos”, according to the paper’s social media analysis.
The crash in Ireland has drawn attention to the activities of the “Lucky Dip” gang, whose members steal cars for thrills and upload footage of their joyriding “for validation and popularity”, said The Telegraph. Irish authorities have warned that they, and groups like them, are “trying to outdo each other” with videos of ever more dangerous driving.
Why are they doing it?
For excitement and for admiration from their peers. Showing off with risk-taking behaviour is nothing new, Mary Aiken, a professor of forensic cyberpsychology at the University of East London, told The Guardian, but social media “is psychologically immersive and could amplify a predisposition to taking risks and ignoring consequences”.
While they are driving, she said, they are “simultaneously filming and capturing content for posting later or live streaming. They have one foot in the real world and one foot in cyberspace. They’re thinking about the likes; they’re thinking about kudos.”
Is TikTok to blame?
The “macabre” video trend “has astonished and outraged” Ireland, and prompted debate not only about policing and criminal justice but also about social media regulation, said The Guardian.
UK defence minister Luke Pollard this morning warned social media companies that they have a decision to make. “They’ve argued against regulations, saying they can police themselves. Well, this is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate it.” The government can use powers in the Online Safety Act to compel them to take this content down but, if they took steps not to allow “their algorithm to share this type of content” to begin with, then “I think we’d be in a better place”.
Ireland’s media regulator said it has asked TikTok for a “full account” of what measures it has taken over risky and reckless driving content on its platform. TikTok has said it monitors content, and removes videos and accounts that break its rules.
TikTok has declined an invitation to appear before an Irish parliament’s media committee, partly because it was the only social-media company to be asked to do so. “We all know” it’s those boys who “are responsible for what happened”, said Alan Kelly, chair of the media committee, but the platform they used was TikTok. And we “want to have assurances, not only that they’ll be reactive and take down such content, but that also they’ll proactively make sure that it doesn’t go up. Because they have the AI tools to prevent this from happening, and they need to show that they’re going to do that.”
