Please, please don’t take driving selfies (because a lot of people are)

There are some things that seem like they don’t need to be said — don’t try to detox your vagina, don’t make burgers green, and don’t keep wild animals as pets, for example. But it turned out that ALL of those things needed to be said, so we’ll reiterate a very, very important piece of advice: Don’t take driving selfies.

A recent study by Auto Insurance Center monitored five years worth of Instagram posts and found a rather disturbing trend emerging: driving-related hashtags, like #DrivingSelfie, #SelfieWhileDriving, and#HopeIDontCrash. Yes, seriously.

Using phones while driving has already been a huge problem in the United States. According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), 660,000 people use handheld cell phones while they drive, either talking, texting, playing games, or — apparently — taking selfies and uploading them to social media behind the wheel. This scary fact has already proven fatal, as people aged 20 to 29 accounted for almost 4 in 10 fatalities while using cell phones and driving.

According to Auto Insurance Center’s report, people in Western states — most notably, California, Nevada, Hawaii, and Washington — post the most driving selfies, and they’ve been increasing vastly in numbers over the past five years.

So one important question remains: Will Instagram ban driving selfies and driving-related hashtags? After all, women’s nipples have never killed a single person, yet Instagram still bans them; driving selfies, on the other hand, are considerably more dangerous. Whether they ban them or not, it needs to be said once again: For everyone’s safety, don’t post driving selfies. Please and thank you.