Driver Livestreams on Tiktok as She Apparently Hits and Kills Man in Chicago
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
theguardian.comOtherstory
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Distracted DrivingSocial Media ResponsibilityRoad Safety
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Distracted Driving
Social Media Responsibility
Road Safety
A driver livestreamed on TikTok while driving and apparently hit and killed a man in Chicago, sparking outrage and discussions about distracted driving and social media accountability.
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Nov 8, 2025 at 12:34 PM EST
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You don't need to convince them that the penalty is high, you need to convince them that the risk is high.
On top of that, people are less likely to know whether there is even a law against those things since it's much less intuitively obvious.
What you need to do is make them understand that it's dangerous, not to make them understand that it's illegal. People don't care about penalties unless they expect to be caught and this is one of the things where it's hard to consistently catch people in the act.
Sounds like something that could be easily abused for cracking down on filming police or similar. Filming ICE agents arresting someone and posting on tiktok? "obstruction of justice", plus they're obviously doing it "for social media". Same for whistleblowers or security researchers.
So no. We simply need to take away the driving licence of such people.
Maybe a warning with a eye tracker or something...
Your last two sentences point in the correct direction: we can't micro-target every behavior that might possibly become a dangerous distraction, because that's just about everything. Driving safely depends on self-regulation, and people incapable of self-regulating (to a minimum standard) shouldn't be granted the privilege of a license.
Yeah, I drove back then. That's not, in practice, what people did, or only what people did. People did map out a route ahead of time, of course, but when they (we) got confused, or missed a turn, out came the map - while driving. Not saying it's good, but that's what happened.
> people driving just fine before satnav
You can check the data. DOT's website is terrible, so I can't link to individual tables, but the relevant one is under Trends > General > Table 1:
https://cdan.dot.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm#
Fatalities and Injuries are obviously dependent on (very welcome!) advances in automobile safety design and medical care, but if accident rates have been increasing over time we'd expect to see many more "property damage only"° accidents. In fact, the raw number of those have been remarkably stable since 1988, despite a huge increase in miles traveled!
There's even an absolute-number decrease between 2007 and 2013, which corresponds with the years during which mobile phones became ubiquitous, and a relative (to miles-traveled) decrease which continues to this day. None of this (of course!) excuses allowing oneself to use a phone in a distracting manner, but my conclusion is that mobile phones have, on net, made driving safer, rather than the reverse.
—
° Or, alternatively "all-type"? I think "property damage" might be cleaner - and, in fact, it's strongly biased against my case, because it's risen from 67% of accidents at the beginning of the dataset to 71% more recently, due to exogenous safety and life-saving improvements.
Mostly the ones I drove were able to tell if I was distracted by checking my instruments or mirrors, or over my shoulder before changing lanes.
I came very close to just abandoning the fucking thing in a car park, and getting a train instead.
New law: driver's phone must be in semi-disabled mode
The phone can already infer it is inside moving vehicle. The bigger challenge is, how to determine the phone belongs to the driver?
Say N passengers in car (including driver), each with cell phone.
When phone infers moving vehicle, it attempts to mesh with other phones in the vehicle.
If N=1, driver is solo, phone semi-disables
If N>1, phones ask users to vote on who is the driver.
Result: 1 phone disabled (Voting tie disables both/all)
The only inconvenience here is to a passenger with a phone-less driver.
Someone just needs to put that in a car. We've also got lidar based cruise control systems to maintain distance as well as panic brake systems that can react to something in front of the vehicle faster than a human, which is partially there to account for people texting and driving while flying up on a red light with stopped traffic.
We have all the tech needed to make it damn near impossible for a 2 ton mass of steal to just unflinchingly mow someone down, yet we live in a world where it's cheaper to not make those things standard, even knowing without it, more people will die than with it.
All States except for Montana ban texting while driving
No States ban complete non-usage of cell phones while driving
> Illinois law prohibits the use of electronic communication devices to write, send, or read text messages, emails, or other electronic communications while driving.
> In 2024, legislation went into effect that also made it illegal to use teleconferencing apps, watch videos, or access social media sites while driving.
> Drivers who are in a crash resulting from distracted driving may face criminal penalties and incarceration.
Well, this would also ban things like GPS, or hooking up Spotify to your steering wheel media buttons.
I think targeting texting + social media is the right approach.
And even if they did an increasing number of cars have small-TV-sized "cell phones" built into the dash.
And as a bonus prize, when you crash due to the distraction and the power is gone you get to solve a 3 part puzzle to open any of the doors to get away from the fast moving fire that probably broke out when the battery cells ruptured.
>“We … will continue to pray for what the driver must be going through,” King reportedly said. “We are trying to find our ways to live, without someone we cherished so much.”
Damn, I wouldn't be saying anything like praying for the driver after something like that.
Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhammapada
“There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over.
"There is," said Father Brown dryly, "and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness today; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown
For forgiveness to mean anything at all you need to forgive an actual injury. “Forgiving” someone for doing what you don’t mind them doing anyway is not forgiveness, it’s tolerance.
It's not without its benefits though. Forgiving someone who grievously hurt you or your family is the first step to letting go and moving on with your life.
> the person driving while on TikTok “wasn’t paying attention to the road because she was reading comments and grinning at her phone”.
She probably would not have had enough time to stop, given how recently she’d been looking at her phone. https://www.tiktok.com/@live.catch.up/video/7569917602479246...
> do you think she has any chance to defend herself in court even if say victim was jaywalking
Presumably entirely depends on how egregious the hypothetical jaywalking was and whether or not she can prove it. i.e. if it would’ve been impossible to avoid the accident regardless of her phone use, the phone use is probably irrelevant.
>HN commenter who only read the headline squabbles over correlation vs causation
its all so wearisome
If you're at the wheel of a moving car and do anything other than driving you're a piece of shit who deserves whatever comes your way (which preferably should be your sorry ass hitting a chunky tree and becoming tetraplegic)
There are 0 situation in which using a phone while driving improves your odds or the odds of other people are you.
It doesn't even matter if it's the victims fault, these people are dangerous and should not drive
It seems clear that one fact we know is that she was paying attention to her phone at the time. Frankly unforgivable in my opinion.
Jon Caramanica records pop music reviews for the New York Times while driving. It's completely asinine.
That's what the hands free laws in most states addressed- using a cellphone while driving became a primary offense, something you could be pulled over for or ticketed for even if you hadn't done anything else wrong.
The ultimate goal is to stop people from distracted driving before they cause an accident, but it's not always easy to see who should be stopped and who shouldn't, so a lot of people get away with it anyway.
That is false. People get pulled over all the time for obvious distractions. Someone addicted to watching the hundreds of bodycam video channels.
Perhaps the cops in your area were told to focus on other things. The Sheriff in my area are somewhat like that whereas the state troopers will happily pull someone over that looks suspicious or has out of state plates distractions aside. Enforcement and abuse vary by location.
This is who you're sharing the road with, you probably pass by dozens of them every day:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_w8Fll6a0hM
Thousands of people get maimed or killed every ear by fucktards who can't wait 10 minutes for their fucking dopamine rush.
A few hours ago I saw (on Twitch) some guy live stream his helicopter piloting over a rural picturesque village in Sweden while shouting loud cheers to "chat".