Tiktok, Snapchat and other social media firms feel heat from MPs
TikTok, Snapchat and other social media companies have been asked by MPs to set out how they identify dangerous driving content on their platforms and how much of this they have removed in the past year.
Dame Caroline Dinenage, who chairs the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, branded it “shocking that videos glorifying dangerous driving can be accessed so easily online”.
In her letters, also sent to YouTube and Meta – which owns Instagram and Facebook – she said recent reporting on “tragic” road crashes in the UK and Ireland “has brought renewed attention to concerns about content on video-sharing platforms that promotes dangerous driving”.
Five young people died when their vehicle was driven the wrong way along a dual carriageway and hit a police car on a dual carriageway in Teesside at the weekend, killing the two officers as well.
A statement from Cleveland Police on Monday said there was currently “no evidence to indicate that filming of the activities that took place on Friday night and Saturday morning has taken place for the purposes of TikTok”.
However, a social media account thought to have belonged to one of the five people travelling in the Volkswagen shared videos last year appearing to show dangerous driving, the BBC reported, adding that the videos have since been removed.
The deadly crash in England came a week after one in Ireland which claimed the lives of five teenagers, who died when the car they were travelling in was driven the wrong way down a motorway and was involved in a head-on collision with another vehicle.
After that crash, the Irish Government and opposition politicians criticised social media companies for failing to restrict or quickly remove content depicting dangerous driving.
Dame Caroline has given the platforms until September 3 to respond to her questions, which include setting out the steps they take to identify “content that depicts, promotes or encourages dangerous driving”, estimates for the amount of UK-originated dangerous driving content posted on their platform over the past 12 months and the number of views.
She has also urged them to set out how much of this content has been removed over that period, and how much was identified by their own systems or reported by users or law enforcement bodies.
She also asked them to set out any “barriers” to identifying and removing such content quickly and what steps they can take to address those.
Dame Caroline said: “We must act quickly to stop this alarming online trend and to reduce the risk of copycat behaviour on our roads.
“Social media companies must take greater responsibility for the material available on their platforms and explain what more they are doing to identify and remove it.”
TikTok has previously said its policies strictly prohibit content that could cause significant physical harm, including dangerous driving, and that it actively removes any videos and accounts that break its rules.
In the first three months of this year it said 99.8% of the content removed for violating policies prohibiting dangerous activities was taken down by TikTok proactively.
Meta has also previously said it prohibits people from promoting, advocating for or encouraging participation in so-called high-risk viral challenges, including the trend of dangerous driving against oncoming traffic, adding that it removes such content once it becomes aware of it.
The tech firm also said it restricts under-18s from seeing content depicting reckless driving.
YouTube and Snapchat have been contacted for comment.