On August 16th, a BMW carrying five teenagers drove the wrong way down the M9 near Moone, Co Kildare, and hit an oncoming vehicle head-on. All five of them died. Four people in the other car, including a seven-year-old boy, were seriously injured; as I write this, two women remain in critical condition.
Six days later, on the A66 near Middlesbrough, a car travelling against traffic struck a Cleveland Police armed response vehicle. All seven people in the two cars died.
While these were separate incidents, the connection between them is difficult to ignore. Several of the A66 dead had previously posted TikTok videos of reckless driving; those videos remained on the platform after the crash. Irish media linked some of the M9 teenagers to a subculture of car theft, joyriding, and online performance for engagement.
Autoplay removes the need for a decision to continue scrolling, infinite scroll eliminates the structural cue that tells a user to stop
Wrong-way driving incidents aren’t unknown on our motorways (one in June 2024 caused me to spend several hours gridlocked overnight near Castlebellingham) but they are becoming more frequent. Transport Infrastructure Ireland recorded 62 of them on Irish motorways by August 2026, a 32 per cent increase on the same period the year before.
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The cyberpsychologist Mary Aiken has described the behaviour as “clout chasing”, with participants driving while simultaneously producing content for posting or livestreaming. This is particularly dangerous because the algorithm that distributes the content rewards escalation. A video of someone driving at the speed limit receives very little engagement, but a video of someone at 190km/h on the wrong side of a motorway in the early hours of the morning will.
The fear of media influencing children is hardly new. When television arrived in western households in the 1950s, it attracted criticisms that today sound familiar. Newton Minow, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission, called American television “a vast wasteland” in 1961 and it was given pejorative names like the idiot box or the electronic babysitter. Although some of these criticisms contained at least a kernel of truth, much of it was class anxiety about popular culture dressed up as concern about cognition. Similarly, the early-’90s criticisms of The Simpsons as a harbinger of civilisational collapse seem absurd now, not least because those early series had an almost quaint faith in the power of the nuclear family.
But the main difference between early television and social media is the level of interaction. While TV broadcast fixed programming, apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube play content uploaded by users, and allow other users to like, share, and comment on it. Crucially, sharing something with a comment criticising its contents counts as a form of engagement to the algorithms that distribute it. This creates a feedback loop, in that content that attracts more interaction is distributed to more and more users and so engagement, whether positive or negative, is incentivised. Meanwhile, structural features such as autoplay and infinite scroll are designed to keep attention focused on the app, with as little effort from the user as possible.
These carefully engineered design features are currently the subject of litigation. Last month, 29 US state attorneys general went to trial against Meta in Oakland, arguing that Instagram’s infinite scroll, autoplay and recommendation algorithms were designed to addict children. In July, the European Commission issued preliminary findings that the same features violated the Digital Services Act.
Engagement by social media companies is typically aimed at holding the user’s attention and therefore maximising advertising views. But the same underlying mechanism has been commercialised in other media. EA Sports generated $1.6 billion in a single fiscal year from its Ultimate Team modes, a substantial portion from the FC game (formerly Fifa).
In these modes, players buy virtual packs containing randomised digital athletes to assemble a team. As other players do the same, and players compete online against each other, the incentive is to spend more money, with uncertain odds, to acquire better athletes. Similar devices are common across multiplayer games, where they can be used to obtain more powerful items, or even just different aesthetics for characters. In effect, they are laying wagers for potential clout.
Regulators and consumer groups in Norway and the US have raised issues with this approach since at least 2022, while in 2025 the EU Parliament suggested that loot boxes should be banned when they cause gambling-like behaviour in children. The Massachusetts attorney general went further, arguing that infinite scrolling is intentionally designed to addict children. Last month, 29 US state attorneys general appeared in court against Meta in Oakland, arguing that Instagram’s infinite scroll, autoplay, and recommendation algorithms were designed to addict children. In July, the European Commission found that the same features violated the Digital Services Act.
Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, places any authenticated user under 14 into youth mode by default. Their daily limit is 40 minutes, enforced by a hard stop
By contrast, Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, places any authenticated user under 14 into youth mode by default. In this mode, the app is inaccessible between 10pm and 6am and has a hard limit of 40 minutes daily. Its algorithm delivers educational content like science experiments, language lessons and cooking.
Last November, Emmanuel Macron argued that China was exporting an app that “dulls young minds while keeping what sharpens them for its own population.”
In many ways, it is technologically impressive that an algorithmically optimised feed can identify which content keeps a specific fourteen-year-old watching at 3am and give them more of it. But when the content it delivers is a video of someone driving into oncoming traffic, and the algorithm incentivises producing more of it, the word “feature” seems inadequate.
