Six days on from the shocking crash on the M9, in which a car travelling the wrong way led to the death of five teenagers and seriously injured four other people, debate continues over how to prevent a recurrence. Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan has promised gardaí more resources, including pursuit training for the first time, along with a possible new offence of driving the wrong way along a motorway.
Attention has also turned to the responsibility of social media companies. The Garda Commissioner and others have pointed to the potency of notoriety for marginalised young men seeking status before a far wider audience than any they could reach in any other way.
The major platforms have responded predictably. TikTok said it was removing videos that breach its rules, while Meta and Snapchat gave similar assurances. Such statements deserve scepticism. None of these companies is noted for candour, and their assurances have a well-rehearsed quality. As this newspaper has reported, videos of similar criminality were still accessible in the days after the crash. TikTok, meanwhile, has declined to appear before the Oireachtas media committee, citing the ongoing official inquiries.
Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, media regulator Coimisiún na Meán (CnaM) must ensure platforms promptly remove content breaching their codes of conduct, which this footage plainly does. The public deserves a clearer account of whether that duty is being enforced.
RM Block
Swifter takedowns are only part of the story, though. The point of these platforms is not that anyone can upload content but that it reaches the feeds of millions who never sought it. These are precision-tooled engines of amplification, tuned to gauge virality and hold attention. The problem is not the upload. It is that when the algorithm amplifies a video, the company becomes not a neutral host but an active participant, complicit in the harm that follows.
But product design, the very thing that makes these services so addictive, lies outside CnaM’s remit. The national regulator is confined to monitoring content. Design falls to the European Commission, which, under articles 34 and 35 of the Act, can require platforms to reduce the harms flowing from their recommender systems, order redesigns and levy fines up to 6 per cent of global turnover. It has barely begun doing this, with preliminary findings against TikTok in February and Meta in July over their addictive design. No platform has yet been forced to change the core features that decide who sees what.
For two decades these companies operated with near-impunity, treated in law as neutral conduits rather than designers of the systems doing the pushing. That legal framework was a terrible mistake. Accountability is long overdue.
