Why aren’t there more prosecutions for dangerous driving videos on social media?

Social media companies have a responsibility in law to remove illegal content once they become aware of it. In some cases this is black and white. Coimisiún na Meán highlights threats or the sharing of intimate images without permission as examples.But where content depicts illegal activity rather than being illegal itself, there is more of a grey area. The regulator may expect moderation but videos depicting ostensible crimes, from trespass to assault, are common around the world. The recent flood of videos showing joyriding and dangerous driving poses a challenge to social media companies such as TikTok and Snapchat. The quantity of videos being uploaded to these platforms makes it challenging to keep on top of banning accounts and moderating illegal content. They must also differentiate real footage from either AI-generated content or highly realistic video game content.READ MOREThe nature of the content, typically blurry videos pointing out the windows of cars, can also complicate matters.Nonetheless, the platforms appear to have acted swiftly to ban accounts since coming under criticism in recent days.Are accounts posting this material being banned?The Irish Times on Monday examined a sample selection of TikTok accounts that had been actively posting video footage of joyriding. The majority of these have since been banned by the platform, though new videos of car thefts have been posted since the incident on Sunday.Some videos have been posted today showing dangerous driving in purportedly stolen cars by users bragging about gardaí being unable to catch them. Social media companies typically use a mix of automated systems and human moderators to police content on their platforms. TikTok claims a 99.1 per cent record of removing violent and criminal content before it is reported.The sheer volume of content on such platforms – there are tens of millions of videos posted globally each day – means that some content can always make it through the net of moderation.Who enforces the rules?Coimisiún na Meán is responsible for regulating social media giants’ activities in Ireland and in some cases across the EU.The commission said it has contacted TikTok to “seek a full account” of how it is dealing with reports of illegal content and its application of its terms and conditions, as well as if it has strengthened its moderation processes or “scaled up proactive monitoring”.“We are also inquiring whether they have reported any relevant information or suspicion of criminal activity to An Garda Síochána,” it said on Tuesday.The commission’s executive chairman Jeremy Godfrey highlighted “concerns about glorification” and said content is frequently reposted beyond the original account that uploaded the video, or cross-posted to other social media platforms, which makes it difficult to address.Why aren’t there more prosecutions?Simon McGarr, a solicitor and managing director of Data Compliance Europe, said many of these videos are problematic for gardaí.“Videos like this that have been uploaded to social media, by person or persons unknown, do have evidential value, but they don’t have the perfect evidential value you might get if the gardaí were to seize a phone directly.”While it is possible to use videos posted to social media in achieving a prosecution, McGarr said there can be “big unknowns” such as the date videos were taken, gaps between the capture and upload dates, and issues around possible editing of the video – including whether it has been deepfaked.As a result social media videos are more likely to be used to support other evidence in achieving a conviction.Garda sources back up this perspective. If people are identifiable in these videos, it may be possible to use them to secure prosecutions. However, with strained staffing levels they say it is not possible to actively monitor social media.A warrant to search the phones of TikTok thieves may be acquired if there is reasonable suspicion that the carjackers were actively videoing during the incident.This may give rise to gardaí getting video content directly from their phones, which would be stronger evidence than potentially reposted social media clips.