What happened in Ireland on Sunday is horrific, and when five teenagers lose their lives in a motorway crash involving a car being driven in the wrong direction, it is almost impossible not to ask, “What on earth were they thinking?” – it’s difficult to comprehend how anyone could make a decision carrying such an obvious and potentially devastating risk. There is a very human temptation to dismiss it as stupidity, recklessness or simply another group of teenagers doing something dangerous for a laugh, but I think that risks missing the much bigger conversation we need to be having, because this was not happening in a vacuum; there is growing evidence of a wider online culture in which stolen cars, reckless driving, police pursuits, extreme speeds and increasingly dangerous behaviour are filmed, shared and rewarded with attention, likes and status.
I don’t think we should pretend that social media invented teenagers doing silly things, because it obviously didn’t: young people have been stealing cars, driving too fast, showing off and doing incredibly dangerous things to impress their mates since long before TikTok or any other platform existed. What social media has changed is the scale, the audience and, perhaps most importantly, the reward attached to the behaviour, because instead of doing something reckless with a few mates watching and more than often resulting in a clip around the ears from Gran when you got back home, you can now film it, upload it and potentially have thousands of people watching, commenting, sharing and telling you how mad you are, while somebody else sees that content and thinks they can go one better, and suddenly you have a feedback loop where the behaviour isn’t simply being witnessed; it is being rewarded, amplified and some kind of implicit challenge issued for someone to “do one better”…
That is the bit I think we need to get to the crux of, because we keep talking about “challenges” as though every harmful trend arrives neatly packaged with a name, a hashtag and a set of instructions, when actually that isn’t necessarily how trends develop online at all. Sometimes it is simply a particular type of content that starts getting attention, then more people copy it, then the people copying it realise that the more extreme version gets more engagement, and before long you have an online environment where behaviour that would once have been regarded as completely insane becomes something that young people recognise, understand and perhaps even aspire to because they have repeatedly seen other people doing it and being rewarded.
This isn’t unique to driving, which is why I think this needs to be a much wider conversation about social media rather than another knee-jerk discussion about one particular platform or “trend”. We have seen exactly the same underlying pattern around dangerous physical stunts, eating challenges, self-harm content, sexualised behaviour, bullying, humiliation, criminal behaviour and all sorts of other things where the original behaviour might have been relatively contained, but once it becomes content, the audience changes everything, because somebody can watch it, copy it, modify it, make it more extreme and then upload their own version in the hope of getting even more attention.
What concerns me is that we tend to look at the finished piece of content rather than its source and the journey that produced it, so we see the video of somebody doing something dangerous and ask why the platform didn’t remove that particular video, whereas perhaps the more important questions are how many similar videos that person had already watched before engaging in their own version, whether the platform was recommending increasingly extreme material, whether the same group of accounts were repeatedly interacting with one another. Were the comments encouraging people to go further, so that the behaviour was already becoming a recognisable trend and, crucially, whether anyone was looking at the pattern rather than treating every individual piece of content as an isolated incident.
Because once five teenagers die, it is obviously too late to start asking whether the behaviour should have been recognised as a developing trend, and that is why I think we need to move away from this obsession with finding “the challenge” and start talking about how online trends actually work. A challenge doesn’t necessarily begin with somebody sitting down and inventing one; sometimes it begins with somebody doing something outrageous, which rapidly results in a whole community developed around behaviour that becomes progressively more extreme because attention and “likes” are the currency being traded and aspired towards.
And before anybody jumps in with “well, teenagers should know better”, yes, of course they should understand that driving the wrong way down a motorway can kill people, and ultimately people have to take responsibility for their own actions, but acknowledging that responsibility doesn’t mean we have to pretend that the environment permitting those decisions has no influence whatsoever. We understand this principle perfectly well in the offline world, because we know that peer pressure, group behaviour, status, competition and the desire to belong can influence young people’s decisions, yet somehow when that same dynamic takes place through a phone, we often act as though it suddenly doesn’t count because nobody physically forced them to do anything.
And there is another part of this tragedy that I think we need to keep firmly in the conversation, because this wasn’t simply five teenagers making an incredibly dangerous decision that ultimately cost them their lives; there were four completely uninvolved people in the other vehicle, a family travelling along the motorway, who were suddenly put directly in the path of that decision and seriously injured. That matters because when we talk about “young people taking risks” or “doing something stupid for social media”, it can sometimes sound as though the consequences belong only to the people making the videos, when in reality a decision made for a few seconds of excitement, attention or online status can completely change the lives of others people who had absolutely nothing to do with it, and that is perhaps the most sobering part of all.
There is also something rather uncomfortable about the fact that adults are doing exactly the same thing on social media, just usually in less immediately lethal ways, because we have created an attention economy where outrageous opinions and images/videos get more engagement than sensible ones, deliberately provocative posts get more visibility than measured discussion, and people quickly learn that if they want attention, they have to keep escalating whatever it was that got them noticed in the first place. We shouldn’t therefore be completely shocked when young people, who are still developing their judgement and understanding of consequences, learn exactly the same lesson and apply it to something much more dangerous in an environment where they are shielded from the boundaries that carers do their best to establish in the real world.
So I don’t think the answer is simply “ban TikTok”, because another platform would appear tomorrow and the underlying problem would still exist, just as I don’t think it is fair or useful to blame every teenager who uses social media because the overwhelming majority are not doing anything like this. What I do think we need is a much more serious conversation about what happens when platforms can see a pattern of behaviour developing, particularly when that behaviour has a demonstrable potential to cause real-world harm, and whether they should be looking not simply at whether an individual post breaks a rule, but at whether thousands of apparently separate pieces of content are collectively creating and reinforcing a dangerous trend.
Because ultimately, that is the question I would like us to be asking after this tragedy: not simply “what challenges were these kids doing?”, but “what are we rewarding online, how do these trends develop, and how far does something have to escalate before we recognise that we aren’t dealing with a collection of individual videos anymore, but with a culture of behaviour that is being created, reinforced and amplified in front of us?” If we genuinely want to protect young people online, perhaps that is the conversation we need to start having, because by the time a trend has become so obvious that everybody can see the damage it is causing, the people who needed to notice it earlier may already have missed the opportunity to do something about it.
