Don’t blame TikTok for the A66 collision

The head-on collision that killed seven people – including two police officers – on the A66 near Middlesbrough on the weekend was a tragedy in every sense of the word. It was also a tragedy that, from what we know, had an obvious cause: a car being driven at high speed in the early hours of the morning, down the wrong side of a dual carriageway, to avoid the police who were in pursuit.

It is clear to everyone that those in the car, particularly the driver, were responsible for what happened. Unless you are a politician, that is. Because, as with every tragedy or baleful trend nowadays, the finger of blame has already been pointed at social media. In this case, TikTok has been deemed responsible for hosting videos that show dangerous driving.

Speaking on BBC Radio 5 on Monday, UK defence secretary Luke Pollard demanded that social-media companies ‘step up’ and stop incentivising ‘people to generate such awful content’. ‘Social-media companies could take the content down easily and adjust their algorithms to stop it being distributed’, he said. Since then, the PM has waded in, branding social-media posts that celebrate joyriding as ‘truly reprehensible’.

On that, most of us can agree. But is it really relevant to what happened on the A66 in the early hours of Saturday morning? The facts tell a different story. Shortly before 4am, Cleveland Police officers detected a car with cloned number plates. They pursued it for seven minutes before aborting the chase when the vehicle – a Volkswagen Passat – turned on to the wrong side of the dual carriageway. It continued to travel at high speed until it struck a police car travelling in the opposite and correct direction. The five young passengers of the Volkswagen and the two police officers – PC Tom Clough and PC Matthew Blades – all died. In other words, the men who caused the accident were fleeing the police, not filming themselves for TikTok clout.

What’s more, it seems unlikely that these young men had been inspired to drive recklessly by spending too much time on social media. Four of the five in the offending vehicle had pleaded guilty to a combined 37 offences between October 2023 and June of this year. These were not minor offences. One of the passengers, Makai Saddington, had admitted to four counts of assaulting police officers in April. Another passenger, Cole Worthy, had pleaded guilty to four driving offences in June. Jakub Matusiak had been convicted of one count of driving without a licence and another of driving without insurance, as recently as March this year. So far 17 people have since been arrested in connection with the accident, all of whom are suspected of participating in organised crime. The evidence so far suggests this collision was caused by repeat criminal offenders, not thrill-seeking teens.

What’s more, there is currently no evidence that the people in the car that caused the accident were filming themselves. In fact, Cleveland Police have explicitly ruled this out as a cause of the collision. They said there is ‘no evidence to indicate that filming of the activities… has taken place for the purposes of TikTok’. So why is TikTok the only thing that Downing Street and the defence secretary want to talk about?

It wasn’t TikTok that killed those two police officers. It was the justice system that allowed four of the VW’s passengers to remain at large, when their recent conduct proved they really had no right to be. Makai Saddington, for instance, was ordered to pay just £240 in court costs and attend rehabilitation – surely an insufficient penalty for repeatedly assaulting police officers. Despite their repeated and persistent criminality, none has ever seen the inside of a prison cell.

Proper punishment in this case might not only have saved PCs Clough and Blades. It could have also saved the young men – the passengers were aged between 17 and 23 – from themselves. Protecting the public is, rightly, the most important reason why violent individuals are incarcerated. But for many others, jail can also be a necessary corrective. It might have been in this case, too.

Social-media platforms are now routinely scapegoated for just about every major crime or atrocity these days. When Axel Rudakubana fatally attacked three young girls with a knife in Southport in 2024, the UK government was quick to blame Amazon for the murders, as it had sold him his knife. When Islamist terrorist Ali Harbi Ali murdered Conservative MP David Amess in 2022, the crime was absorbed into a ‘broader conversation’ about how people treat MPs on social media. In both cases, the killers were known to the authorities. They had passed through the Prevent deradicalisation scheme. These were catastrophic state failures, and yet the authorities managed to direct the public’s focus on to social media.

We are witnessing something similarly dishonest when it comes to the A66 tragedy. If the responsibility for what happened on the weekend must be shared beyond the obvious perpetrators, then that burden should fall on our decrepit criminal-justice system – not on joyriding videos on TikTok.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.