Tiktok has said it is closely monitoring content related to the deaths of five teenage boys in a head-on collision when their car was driven the wrong way down the M9 motorway in the early hours of Sunday morning.
It added that it is removing videos and accounts that break its rules.
The company also said it removes content that glorifies violence or promotes crimes that could harm people – including risky driving.
TikTok said that between January and March this year, of the content it has removed for violating its policies on violent and criminal behaviour, 99.1% was taken down before it was reported to the platform.
Coimisiún na Meán confirmed it is in contact with TikTok, in a bid to obtain more information about their response to content related to risky and reckless driving.
Meanwhile Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said it restricts users under 18 from seeing certain content that is not suitable for them, which includes dangerous driving.
The company also said it prohibits people from facilitating, organising, promoting or admitting to certain criminal or harmful activities targeted at people, businesses, property or animals.
Emergency services at the scene of the crash on the M9 yesterday
Sinn Féin TD Matt Carthy, who is Chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, said that social media companies need to be held to account on the matter.
“We need to tackle the growing problem of the glorification of these type of actions on social media,” he said this morning.
“Social media companies need to be held to account for allowing these type of videos to remain on pages for prolonged periods of time.
“This is a broken system that needs to be addressed.
“Government need to take very seriously the ability of people to post what are grossly irresponsible illegal actions on social media and for them to remain on social media pages for a prolonged period of time.
“It is invariably and undoubtedly at this stage leading to copycat type of actions and in some instances, as we’ve seen over the weekend, with absolutely devastating consequences.”
Mr Carthy said that the Government cannot wait for gardaí to provide solutions to the problem.
“This, in my view, is now a growing threat to public safety that requires urgent and coordinated action on the part of government, in collaboration with the gardaí,” he said.
“It’s not good enough for Government ministers to say that they’re waiting for the gardaí to propose solutions to these issues.
“What’s required is an urgent and immediate intervention and a coordinated set of actions that actually ensure that we have enough gardaí in respect of roads policing.
“We also need to ensure that gardaí have the training and the resources necessary to deal with these incidents,” he added.
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Restricting dangerous driving videos should be ‘first step’
A professor of cyber-psychology has also called for action to be taken against social media companies where videos of people driving dangerously are uploaded online.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Professor Mary Aiken from Capital Technology University in Washington DC said restricting the publication of videos glorifying dangerous behaviour should be a first step.
“That’s the first place that I would start in a policy context and it’s the place that you can actually effect immediate change,” she said.
Prof Aiken was speaking following the incident in which five teenage boys died, and four other people were seriously injured, when a car was driven the wrong way on the M9 in Co Kildare.
The vehicle, in which the five teenage boys were travelling, was driven southbound on the northbound carriageway when it hit a second car.
Read more:
Post-mortem examinations due on five teenage boys killed in M9 collision
Gardaí not trained to deal with cars ‘going wrong way’ – GRA
Speaking over the weekend, Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly said that in some cases this form of dangerous driving is being carried out for “social media likes”.
He said: “What makes this reckless behaviour even more appalling is that in some cases it is being done for social media likes regardless of the potentially devastating impact it might have on innocent people and themselves.”
Also speaking on Morning Ireland, Garda Representative Association Vice President John Joe O’Connell said there are numerous gangs of young teenage boys and men trying to “outdo each other on social media” through “videos of their interactions with gardaí”.
He said this comes in the form of “engaging in a pursuit and heading the wrong way down a dual carriageway or motorway and videoing this for ‘likes'”.
Prof Aiken said: “I know the Minister [for Justice], Jim O’Callaghan, and I know that he’s very focused on delivering on law and order in a real-world context. But cyberspace is part of that delivery.
“These social media companies claim not to be a form of media, and yet they are,” she said.
Prof Aiken said people who post videos while engaging in dangerous behaviour are “lost in cyberspace”.