Mayor Adams, MTA say social media partly to blame for deadly subway surfing trend
NEW YORK -- Mayor Eric Adams and the MTA are calling for change after a teenage boy died Monday while subway surfing.
They say social media is partly to blame for the alarming trend.
"Some of these sites, they're more addictive than drugs, people can't get off them. And you start duplicating this behavior," Adams said Tuesday.
The mayor even thinks leaders in Washington, D.C. should get involved and President Joe Biden should set up some sort of committee to analyze the negative impacts of social media.
"I think the national government must come in and say, 'What is the corporate responsibility of social media?' I'm just surprised this hasn't been done," said Adams.
Adams says he plans to launch an awareness campaign about the dangers of subway surfing.
The push comes after police say 15-year-old Zackery Nazario, of the Lower East Side, died Monday when his head struck a beam and he fell onto the tracks.
Police say he was subway surfing across the Williamsburg Bridge, an idea he may have gotten after seeing it done on Instagram.
"This was really a terrible, tragic incident of this young man," Adams said.
Back in December, another 15-year-old died subway surfing in Brooklyn, and last August, a teen lost his arm after doing the same stunt in Queens.
While the MTA doesn't have the exact data for subway surfing, it says the number of people riding outside trains skyrocketed over the years. It went up 500% last year alone -- from 206 in 2021 to 928 in 2022.
The agency cited a "noticeable flurry of social media buzz," with kids and teens "posting surfing videos, copying each other, trying to get 'viral.'"
The CEO of the MTA is now imploring social media companies to take down the videos of subway surfing.
"This is something nobody wants to see. A 15-year-old kids just breaks your heart," Janno Lieber said at an MTA safety meeting Tuesday. "So we've got to keep pushing social media companies. It's not news to anybody they're not always focused on discouraging reckless behavior."
The MTA prohibits passengers from climbing outside subway cars or passing between them unless there is an emergency.
