A teenager in Edinburgh, Scotland could face criminal charges after witnessing a man dying in the street and, without calling the police to report the incident, nor going over the help the man, tweeted a photo of the hit-and-run victim with the caption “Eeeehm wtf? Some guy just casually lying outside Ocean Terminal.”

But the man was far from 'casually lying', he was dying from injuries sustained after being hit by a car, understood to be a silver Vauxhall Astra, just moments earlier. The entire tragic incident, while both alarming and distressing, also highlights our often times shameful reliance on social networks such asThe tweet was originally picked up by media sharing site Lockerz. Twitter or Facebook. Have we become so accustomed to tweeting our every move and daily occurrences that the network itself acts like a barrier to the real world around us?

The teenager in question reportedly did not realise the severity of the incident until it was too late, although some of his followers and other users managed to share the photo with local police, who responded to the scene around 10 minutes later. The teenager later tweeted an apology to his followers and has since deleted both the photo and his Twitter account. Meanwhile, the victim has since been named by the BBC as 35-year-old Craig Williams who was hit by a car after falling asleep in a bus lane. He later died of his injuries.

Richard Birkett