A tragedy unfolded in Western Sydney last Sunday as a young female driver playing ‘chicken’ killed herself in a head on collision and caused fatal damage to the innocent car driver she collided into, she also injured her two passengers. The bizarre twist in this fatal car accident was that her two passengers filmed the whole thing on Snapchat live, and later posted selfies of their injuries while in hospital, with no apparent regard to their deceased best friend nor the innocent driver, who was in an induced coma.
We addressed the importance of social media screening potentially violent or illegal activity a few weeks ago when the Christchurch massacre went viral for almost one hour before being taken down. Now Snapchat is showing a few cracks. Facebook owns Instagram but Snapchat remains independent from Facebook and should have the same guidelines that Facebook and Instagram have.
Snapchat is particularly popular with youths aged between 15 to 24 years old. Teens send up to 200 – 300 pictures each day and have big followings, to check into what they are doing and where they are at.
Why is getting ‘likes’ so important to this generation? With a close friend being recently deceased, most people would be mourning the death.