Richard Hogan: State must get tough on social media to protect society

The aftermath of the M9 crash in Kildare in which five teenagers died and four other people were injured. 'An incomprehensible act of recklessness, criminality, and stupidity,' says Richard Hogan. Picture: PA

The country has been in a state of shock since the news broke that five teenage boys intentionally drove a car down the wrong side of the road and ploughed into an innocent family of three sisters and a seven-year-old boy.

The five boys — Jack Kennedy, 17, from Athy, Co Kildare, Jeremy O’Brien, 18, and his cousin Alex McCarthy, 17, from Carlow; Joey Carthy, 15, from Athy, Co Kildare; and Kamil Pustkowski, 17, from Limerick — were all killed in the incident on the M9 motorway last Sunday week.

The sisters in the other car, Alma Kinsella, Niamh Kinsella, Ella Hendricken, and the boy were all hospitalised with serious injuries. They were travelling to Dublin Airport to attend a family wedding in the UK when the car driven by the boys struck them.

It is an incomprehensible act of recklessness, criminality, and stupidity that the boys would drive the wrong way down a road for fun.

I have been trying to get my head around it all week. Trying desperately to gain some insight into why they would do such a thing. Why would teenage boys, with their whole life ahead of them, risk their lives so casually and the lives of others for a moment of delirium and chaos?

Why would they throw it all away as if it meant nothing?

I understand the teenage brain, and how it has very poor risk adverse capacity. How they generally think, it won’t be me. Teenagers are impulsive and often don’t consider the consequences of their actions. Logic and rationality develops after the impulse system in the brain. So, they are poorly equipped to make good decisions at times.

If alcohol was involved, that would impair decision-making even further. But, I think we all know the biggest gateway to behaviour like this is childhood. And we know that one of the boys was in the care of Tusla and two other of the young boys were known to the agency.

That is not an excuse for their behaviour, but it does help us to understand what has happened here. Children with troubled backgrounds got involved in criminal behaviour, and lost their lives in that endeavour, and now innocent people fight for their lives in hospital. The country is willing them a speedy and full recovery.

But children from disadvantaged backgrounds is not the full story. Social media is in this story too, and it doesn’t play a small role. They were in that car, wearing balaclavas, driving the wrong way down the road, for likes on their TikTok account. To feed the recommender system that fed them the same content.

The fact TikTok refused to attend an Oireachtas hearing on the topic tells us all we need to know about its ethics and diligence to protect children.

We are in the biggest fight of our lives, as parents, to protect our children, and the Government is supine, placing the responsibility on the steps of Coimisiún na Meán, and they do not seem up for this fight.

The executive chairperson of Coimisiún na Meán, Jeremy Godfrey, in a recent interview with RTÉ Six One News, said: “We are concerned that videos that are available on the platform [TikTok] might be videos encouraging people to act in a dangerous way, harm their health, commit crimes, and when we have evidence of that and [it] might lead to a breach of their obligations, it’s up to them to have the systems and processes to deal with this content. If they are not adequate, we can take action either on our own or with the European Commission.”

Have you ever heard such nonsense in all of your life? He is essentially saying: If you are breaking the law and endangering the lives of people, it’s on you to please stop doing that or we might consider doing something ourselves.

Am I in the bizarro world? The fact this content is being fed to teenagers is proof enough  the recommender systems are out of control.

My fists were clenched listening to his words. Mr Godfrey needs a wake-up call — what more evidence do you need to act? How many more children and innocent families must be destroyed before you finally make TikTok and other social media platforms responsible for their content?

I’m not saying social media is solely responsible, but if teenagers, troubled or not, consume videos that are promoting reckless and criminal behaviour, if their recommender systems are flooded with that type of content, which we know they are, we all know the potential outcome. And so, we saw that dire outcome on our screens last week.

The vitriol levelled at the children who died was another aspect of this tragedy that I found troubling. We are all angry an incident like this took place, and we are all praying for the innocent people in hospital, but the racism and hatred directed at the families illuminates that something dark has shifted in Irish society. Our capacity for empathy seems to have collapsed.

The comments on RIP.ie and other platforms were disgusting. Five children lost their lives in a moment of criminal recklessness. Nobody is trying to soften that fact. But their voices are silenced forever. We will never know what really happened to put them in the car that morning.

We need more education, and we need regulation to stop this content from ever reaching our children’s minds. Wake up, Mr Godfrey, stop the obfuscation and protect our children.