The case for a crackdown on the evils of social media is overwhelming. So why the delay? – Ian Johnston
It’s time for democracy to assert its authority over the online world in no uncertain terms
As he edges closer to the edge of the cliff, high within a mountain range on a marvellously clear and sunny day, the man’s strange suit forces him to waddle like a penguin. A trip now would seemingly prove fatal. As we watch through his head-mounted camera, he closes several zips on the suit. A brief countdown and he jumps, plunging almost straight down.
But then, as the air screams by, he begins to level out and he is, almost miraculously and wonderfully, flying! He manoeuvres his wingsuit to glide perilously close to the side of the cliff before coming out over a wide valley, launching his parachute and floating to the ground where he exchanges expletives, of joy, exhilaration and, presumably, relief, with a fellow thrill-seeker who followed behind him, filming his descent.
For a while, I found such videos fascinating. This seemed like human flight in its purest form, humanity joining the birds. Some flyers have added a wing like a hydrofoil that allows them to gain height and soar about the sky. The YouTube algorithm still occasionally offers them to me, but I’ve stopped watching. That was after seeing a video of someone flying through a narrow rock arch. It was an impressive feat, an example of the flyer’s skill. But it also seemed excessively dangerous to me.
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Dying for clicks
Travelling at speeds of up to 160mph, a relatively minor miscalculation can result in death for those who choose to fly too close to rocks or trees. And clearly, in a world where some people seek to make a career out of providing social media content, that choice is being driven by the consumption of such videos and the fairly natural fascination with feats that are, hopefully, death-defying.
It started to feel like I, and my fellow viewers, were willing on the daredevils to take increasingly large risks that would, eventually, result in their deaths. So I stopped.
Others take a different attitude. Put “wingsuit flight” into YouTube, and it offers various different ways to complete the search. Among 14 options when I did it on Monday were “deaths”, “gone wrong”, “fail” and “crash”. For this article, in order to confirm such videos really do exist, I watched through a flyer’s headcam as he jumped off a mountain and ended up crashing into some trees on the way down. Astonishingly, he survived, although he was badly injured.
This is far from the only example of how social media is helping to persuade people to do dangerous things.
‘Wrong-way’ driving videos
After five teenagers were killed in a head-on collision while driving the wrong way down a motorway in County Kildare, Ireland – with four people in the other vehicle all seriously hurt – the Irish parliament’s media committee asked TikTok to attend a meeting to discuss “content that glorifies irresponsible or illegal activity”, including ‘wrong-way’ driving videos.
TikTok, however, refused to go, saying there were official investigations into the crash and it would “not be possible to appear before the committee in public session until this process is completed”. It added that there were other social media platforms and messaging services “where instances of the content complained of is present” and the company did “not consider it appropriate to be the sole representative of the video-sharing industry in such circumstances”.
If TikTok truly agrees with all decent people that these videos are unacceptable, then it surely has a duty to ensure they cannot be published on their website in the first place, are swiftly removed or, at the very, very least, explain why this is proving so difficult in order to help elected representatives understand and tackle the problem.
Following the crash on the A66 in Teesside in which five young men in a vehicle driving the wrong way down the road and two police officers in the car they hit were killed, UK government minister Luke Pollard said social media platforms should remove any post “that celebrates this type of dangerous behaviour on our roads”. He spoke of how these videos were creating “financial incentives on people to generate such awful content”.
‘Patterning’, self-harm and suicide
Among other horrors, there are violent young people who engage in a hideous practice known as ‘patterning’, in which someone is beaten up and humiliated for the cameras so that their distress can be viewed by all. Children are said to have died after taking part in dangerous stunts, like the so-called ‘blackout challenge’, after they went viral online. And there are dark corners of social media where self-harm and suicide are actively promoted.
Imagine for a moment that anything like this was appearing not on social media, but in the ‘mainstream media’, which I am proud to have worked for all my career. Imagine the furore about articles promoting suicide to children, lethally dangerous driving and worse. It simply would not be tolerated.
And yet with social media, the rules are different. Their executives are allowed to thumb their noses at our democratically elected representatives. Our laws of defamation and contempt of court seem to matter little. Ministers are reduced to issuing pleas to do the right thing.
There has been some progress. After social media spread fake sexualised images of real people created by AI, the UK made it illegal to request a bot to make such ‘deepfakes’ without the subject’s consent. However, after every step forward, it seems that another scandal emerges.
Any free society requires laws. Democracy now needs to assert its authority over the near-lawless online world and crack down hard on the multiple evils of social media. In the meantime, we all have a duty to consider the wider consequences of the ‘content’ that most of us, including me, so casually consume.