Good morning. The UK government yesterday backed Ofcom to take “tough action” against social media companies that fail to remove posts celebrating dangerous driving, in response to a series of unsafe, and sometimes deadly, viral trends. Young men are filming themselves driving the wrong way down busy streets, accelerating to extreme speeds on narrow rural roads and putting a vehicle in “ghost mode” – switching off headlights and taillights at night – for clicks and kudos.
Andy Burnham labelled people who share such content as “truly reprehensible” after two police officers died in a head on collision in the early hours of Saturday morning near Middlesbrough. Their vehicle crashed into a car driving the wrong way down the A66. Five young men aged between 17 and 23 were inside, all of whom died too. The previous weekend, a family of four were seriously injured in a night-time collision with a car driving the wrong way along the M9 in County Kildare, Ireland. All five teenage boys in that car also died.
