𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Boy racers “dicing with death” face fresh fury for repeatedly terrorising families with reckless late-night meets. Yobs descend on the same roundabout in Kent most weekends, ‘drifting’ their cars around roundabouts at speed and filming their sick exploits for social media.

Spectators block roads leading to nearby estates to watch the high-speed races. Police chiefs were last night warned “someone will end up getting killed”, with locals urging council leaders to install speed traps nearby.

When one lady confronted the louts, they abused her and rocked her van in a vile attempt to intimidate her.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood admitted: “We have to do everything we can to clamp down on the emerging pattern of behaviour that glorifies this type of activity”.

And Ms Mahmood said social media giants such as TikTok, Snapchat and Meta will take a “much more proactive position” on the videos from the middle of next year. This is when key parts of the Online Safety Act kick in, creating a legal duty for Silicon Valley to take action.

Dartford MP Jim Dickson compared the crisis in Dartford, Kent, to the horrific driving moments before five teenagers died in a head-on crash with two hero police officers on the A66.

He said: “My constituency has experienced similar deeply antisocial and incredibly dangerous experiences of racing and speeding on our roads.

“Groups of predominantly young men gather along our main roads, watching cars speeding down those busy roads as content is filmed to be posted on social media.

“We had a particularly bad spike and hotspot over the weekend in a stretch of road called Bob Dunn Way, next to the Bridge estate.”

One mum in Dartford said: “Every weekend, Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday are hell.

“There’s organised meet-ups, with terrible sorting. It’s hell.

“They drift around the roundabouts at high-speed.

“The spectators block the entrance to the local estates. It’s a nightmare.

“There’s groups of dozens of them. It’s so disruptive.

“Someone will end up getting killed. They are dicing with death.”

Another mum, called Sonia, 32, said: “We’re being terrorised. It’s pure chaos.”

Tech bosses are in the spotlight after seven people died in a sickening head-on crash near Middlesbrough.

PC Matthew Blades, 37, and PC Tom Clough, 38, were killed when a Volkswagen Passat – which had been pursued by police – was driven the wrong way along a dual carriageway near Middlesbrough and hit their marked armed response vehicle.

The five young men who died after their vehicle hit a police car on a dual carriageway may have had links to “serious and organised criminal activity”, according to Cleveland Police.

Some of the biggest sites, including TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat, were still awash with videos of cars recklessly weaving through traffic at speeds of more than 100mph last night.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told MPs: “This Government has been implementing various elements of the Online Safety Act and that from the middle of next year the wider measures within the Act will come online.

“That will mean that the larger social media platforms, including TikTok, will be under a legal duty to act against harmful content that breaches their terms of service.

“That will include content of this nature. In the meantime, most of the platforms are taking this content down.

“It is a reactive process, in the sense that they are responding to content being flagged—it has then, for the most part, been removed from their platforms—but from the middle of next year there will be a duty on those platforms to act proactively, not just reactively.”