British government pressures social media over wrong-way driving. Police in the same case speak of organized crime

Two days after the crash on the A66 near Middlesbrough, which claimed seven lives, the British government called on TikTok and other platforms to take down content celebrating dangerous driving. Prime Minister Andy Burnham described the sharing of such footage as „truly reprehensible“ and said so on Monday during a visit to Kyiv. The Independent ↗

The police investigating the crash, however, presented a different picture the same day. Cleveland Police arrested twelve people on suspicions ranging from involvement in the activities of an organized crime group to possession of weapons and drugs — and added one sentence to the widely circulated version about social media: it currently has no evidence that the activities from that night were being filmed for TikTok. BBC ↗

Seven dead in ten seconds

According to the independent watchdog IOPC, officers followed a Volkswagen Passat for almost seven minutes and ended the pursuit when the car entered the A66 in the wrong direction in the South Bank area. Ten seconds later, at 3:39 local time, the Passat collided head-on with a marked police vehicle. Inside it were 38-year-old Tom Clough and 37-year-old Matthew Blades, who were in the area because they were helping search for the same car. All five people in the Passat also died — 23-year-olds Michael Robert Cahill and Jacob Matusiak, 18-year-old Makai Saddington and 17-year-olds Theo Rae and Cole Robert Worthy. BBC ↗

Read also: Seven people died in a crash near Middlesbrough

The government had an answer on Monday morning

Defence Secretary Luke Pollard took the government response to the media on Monday morning. He told BBC Breakfast that the networks can act immediately: „Social media companies can take this down today and adjust the algorithms so that this is not being glorified.“ On radio, he then also named the motive he sees behind such videos — the more outrageous the content, the more views, and views are sometimes paid for. According to Pollard, the government will use powers under the Online Safety Act to force the removal of the content. BBC ↗

Downing Street subsequently described the glorification of dangerous driving as „utterly shameful“ and said Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy insists on the removal of content in line with the platforms' legal obligations. According to the government, regulator Ofcom has its „full support“ to take tough action against those that fail to meet their obligations. The Independent ↗

Ofcom itself recalled that under the law platforms must minimize children's exposure to violent content and to content promoting dangerous challenges, and that in July it had already launched an investigation into whether TikTok is fulfilling its child protection obligations. TikTok said its rules ban content that may cause serious physical harm, including dangerous driving, and that of the content it removed for breaching these rules from January to March 2026, it found 99.8% itself, without an external report. BBC ↗

Police describe a different story

The investigation into the events before the crash is meanwhile heading elsewhere. On Saturday morning the force received multiple reports of two cars being driven dangerously. The first of them, probably a Volvo XC60, was said to have been crashing into buildings in Middlesbrough. According to police, the Passat was linked to this activity and both vehicles were driving with cloned registration plates captured by automatic number-plate recognition cameras. Four of the five people in the Passat had previous convictions, according to police. BBC ↗

Police arrested nine men and three women aged between 19 and 61. The suspicions range from involvement in the activities of an organized crime group, through possession of a firearm without a certificate and possession of drugs with intent to supply, to assisting an offender and making threats to kill. One man has already been charged with possession of drugs with intent to supply, while some of those arrested are on bail. Deputy Chief Constable Wayne Fox described the investigation as „fast-moving and complex“ and speaks of „serious criminality that has resulted in this fatal collision“. A police federation fundraiser for the families of the two dead officers has meanwhile exceeded half a million pounds. BBC ↗ The Guardian ↗

According to court records, one of the dead had a history of cases involving police officers. According to records confirmed to The Independent by the British court service, Makai Saddington pleaded guilty in July to assaulting a police officer and to racially aggravated causing fear to another police officer, and the court imposed a twelve-month conditional discharge. Earlier, he had pleaded guilty to three assaults on a police officer in Middlesbrough from October 2025. The Independent ↗

The trend is real, it just may not explain this particular crash

That the phenomenon exists was also confirmed by the BBC Verify fact-checking team. It found dozens of videos showing high-speed chases, driving on pavements and wrong-way driving. On an account that the BBC said probably belonged to Saddington, there was a 94-second recording more than a year old showing driving on pavements and grassy areas in Ormesby, and a second video with the speedometer at 100 miles per hour, roughly 160 km/h. Both have now been deleted, and TikTok also removed other clips to which the BBC alerted it. BBC Verify ↗

A week before the A66 crash, on 16 August, five teenagers were killed while driving the wrong way on a motorway in Ireland's County Kildare, and four other people suffered serious injuries. John Joe O'Connell, vice-president of the Irish police representative association, said at the time that such drivers „play Russian roulette with their lives and with the lives of everyone else“. The Independent ↗

What others saw in it and what we saw here

The Irish part of the story was picked up by domestic newsrooms. Pravda and STVR wrote about „likes at the cost of life“ on 17 August, the Czech Seznam Zprávy on 22 August and Novinky.cz a day later. STVR ↗ Novinky.cz ↗ Pravda ↗ Seznam Zprávy ↗

The British continuation, meaning the tension between the debate over platform responsibility and the police investigation into possible organized crime, was noticed on Monday in the German-speaking space — and with precisely the emphasis that the British tabloids left out. Tagesspiegel and n-tv built their headlines around the police sentence that there is no indication of a TikTok trend, while Austria's Der Standard and Hungary's HVG wrote about the debate over online videos. Tagesspiegel ↗ n-tv ↗ Der Standard ↗ HVG ↗

In the monitored Slovak and Czech RSS sources as of the morning of 25 August, there is not a single article on this continuation. And yet this is precisely the part that travels beyond Britain too — governments can put pressure on platforms within hours, investigations take months, and the order in which the two things arrive affects what the public remembers from a tragedy.

The limits of this view

An arrest is not a verdict. Some people are on bail and a charge has so far been brought in only one case, so what police have released cannot be used to infer the guilt of specific individuals or that the dead from the Passat were part of a group. The Guardian ↗

The „TikTok gangs“ frame comes mostly from British tabloids, for which it is also a commercially extremely advantageous story. Newsrooms also differ over whom the videos belonged to — BBC Verify speaks of an account probably belonging to Saddington, while The Independent's explainer attributes the footage to Matusiak. Police have confirmed neither version. The Independent ↗

And finally, the tool the government has reached for targets content, not what happened on the road. The rules on police pursuits will be determined only by a separate IOPC investigation, which has nothing to do with the Online Safety Act. BBC ↗

What hotinfo is watching

Illustrative photo: a Cleveland Police vehicle, the force investigating the A66 crash and which lost two officers in it. Author Graham Mitchell, Flickr via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 licence.