A consensus is building, from gardaí to child psychologists, that the horrific collision on the M9, near Moone, Co Kildare, last Sunday was made possible by the influence of social media.

Criminologist Trina O’Connor called the actions of the five teenagers who drove a BMW the wrong way down the motorway, killing themselves and seriously injuring four people in another car, “performative crimes”, committed, in the words of our Taoiseach, “for likes on social media”.

The incident is generating policing, criminal justice and children’s welfare policy debates, but is also exposing the limits of Europe’s social media regulations to make companies liable for the harms their products cause.

The Irish Times reported on Monday how videos of teenagers joyriding have been posted to TikTok “almost daily” for some time.

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TikToks of the most dangerous driving get the most engagement, or “likes”, a metric that has two impacts.

The first is that videos that get strong reactions are amplified by the algorithms that determine users’ social media feeds. So the more outrageous or dangerous a video is, and the more people engage with it, then the more likely it is to reach a wider audience.

Second, as we heard from Professor Niamh Hourigan on RTÉ this week, the quest for social media........

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