I often cover stolen car news, police chases, and deadly crashes. Most days, someone in the U.S. engaging in these risky behaviors dies a tragic death. They’re often young. And I usually have to read their name. I’m all for curbing some media that may be exacerbating the problem. But today’s British ban of a silly Twix candy bar commercial is not the answer.

The banned Twix commercial

The Twix candy bar brand just dropped a new commercial in its “Two is more than one” campaign. Twangy rock music plays while a man drives an old car through a mountain range in the desert. He seems to be running away from another old car. Then he smashes through a guard rail and rolls down a steep bank. Then he lands, upside-down, on another car.

Our upside-down driver drops a Twix bar through his sunroof and another man catches it. Pan out to, two identical drivers in two identical cars, crushed together roof-to-roof. They drive slowly off into the sunset and Twix’s new slogan pops up: “Two is more than one.” You can watch the tomfoolery embedded below. But don’t get any ideas!

The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority received a whopping five complaints about the new Twix commercial. So the buzzkills there ruled that the ad  “condoned unsafe driving” and “must not appear again.”

Those wet blankets took umbrage with the  “fast paced beat and music”  and the car chases’s “visible skid marks” for an  “emphasis on speed.” The nanny state then scolded Mars-Wrigley “not to condone or encourage irresponsible driving that was likely to breach the legal requirements of the Highway Code in their ads.”

As if this silly ad, when aired in the midst of the latest Fast and Furious movie on TV, is going to be the thing that inspires some driver to break the law!

For its part, Mars-Wrigley argued “the cars were shot driving at lawful speeds” then the ad was edited for  “cinematic presentation” and the result was a “world that was absurd, fantastical and removed from reality.”

Focusing on the wrong media

The latest research shows that even children are capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality–at a shockingly early age. What’s more, even violent video games don’t diminish this “ability to differentiate automatically between real and virtual.”

Our problem is not some overtly-fake car chase. But, we have a media problem that may be contributing to absurdly unsafe behavior.

The real culprit may not be goofy, slapstick TV spots. It may be the entire social media accounts and hashtags dedicated to how to steal cars. It may be social media trends (i.e. The Kia Challenge) encouraging young folks to steal cars just so they can film dangerous stunts and then abandon them. These are actual videos and peer pressure that don’t pretend to be fantasy. If the very profitable social media platforms making money off such videos can’t root them out and censor them, then perhaps those platforms need to face legal consequences.