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White Paper: Run It Straight: A Call to Action Against a Perfect Brain Injury Delivery System

“Run It Straight,” involves two participants running at each other at full speed and colliding, with the winner decided by who hits the hardest and stays upright. These events are recorded, shared, and amplified on social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, where they reach broad audiences, often including younger viewers.The popularity of this challenge has inspired for-profit competitive events, including Run It Straight Official, and the RUNIT Championship League. These activities, like so-called “Dwarf Tossing” before them, turn real human risk and harm into a spectacle. They represent what Medical Historian Stephen Casper calls “perfect brain injury delivery systems”—efficient packages of harm that transform the risk of severe brain injury into viral entertainment.

The biomechanical forces involved in these collisions are equivalent to being in a car crash without a seatbelt. These forces have the potential to cause death or lifelong disabilities that can affect every aspect of a person’s life. Yet the RUNIT Champions League and the “Run It Straight” social media challenge on which RUNIT is based are framed as merely a challenge, a game, or a sport, with no mention of the catastrophic potential for head and neck injuries, acute brain damage, or long-term neurological diseases.

It’s critical to emphasize that, although participants may choose to engage in such activities, their choice is neither fully free nor fully informed. Social, financial, and peer pressures can drive individuals to participate in these risky contests without a proper understanding of the level of risk they are taking on. Are social media companies incentivized to build algorithms to generate excitement and normalize the practice for the world’s youth, turning injuries into clicks and views? Absolutely. Are organizations like the RUNIT Championship League further incentivized to maximize the violence of their ‘sport’ to drive engagement and differentiate themselves in an oversaturated market? Yes. This is an example of how social media’s role as both an incredibly profitable global industry and a cultural superhighway incentivizes social trends that turn fantasy into reality with foreseeable and terrible consequences. The real cost of these events and trends is borne by those who get hurt, their families, the health care systems––and not by the audiences who cheer them on or the businesses who profit by ignoring the harm their products create.

It is our ethical duty to raise awareness about the dangers of “Run It Straight,” the RUNIT Championship League, and similar activities. We urge sports organizations, policymakers, and social media platforms to acknowledge the seriousness of these risks and take action.

Recommendations

• Clearly warn the public as to the fragility of the human brain to concussive or subconcussive blows. Quite simply, the human body is not designed to withstand blows to the head. 

• Clearly warn the public, athletes, and parents about the dangers of “Run It Straight,” the RUNIT Championship League, and similar activities, emphasizing the risk of brain injury, death, disability, and long-term neurodegenerative diseases.

• Develop and enforce bans on “Run It Straight” events and the RUNIT Championship League in organized sport and on social media platforms, including demonetizing videos that promote such activities.

• Educate social media companies about the health risks of these videos and their responsibility to moderate content that endangers human life.

• Recognize that “Run It Straight” and the RUNIT Championship League are not a sport but a perfect brain injury delivery system that exploits participants for entertainment.

• Develop educational resources for schools and communities that emphasize safer sports, healthy exercise and recreational activities, and explain the risks of uncontrolled high-impact collisions.

• Encourage policymakers to pass urgent legislation banning the organization, promotion, and monetization of “Run It Straight”-style events, including the RUNIT Championship League.

• Call on researchers to study the pathological, neurological, social, and economic repercussions of these types of activities and to share the findings within the public domain.

Conclusion
“Run It Straight” and businesses like the RUNIT Championship League are the latest in a long line of spectacles that commodify violence and human suffering. Clinicians, scientists, policymakers, and platform managers have an ethical obligation to protect vulnerable individuals from these perfect brain injury delivery systems and improve our cultural understanding of the human brain’s vulnerability to collisions. 

OpenAi was used in the preparation of this document. The argument, content, and framework represents the equal contribution of the authors. The prompt description is listed below in references.  

Ai Prompt and References

Drafting Prompt Summary for White Paper on “Run It Straight”

This first draft of the White Paper on “Run It Straight” was generated with the assistance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, guided by a detailed prompt that emphasized the following:

• Modeling Structure and Tone: The draft closely followed the structure and tone of  previous Repercussion Group white papers. This approach was chosen to maintain consistency with the group’s voice and ensure clarity and impact.

• Original Wording: Every sentence was newly written and paraphrased, avoiding any direct copying from prior white papers or other published documents.

• Content Relevance: The prompt included instructions to focus on the specific issue of “Run It Straight,” adapting the general principles from the group’s earlier work on concussion.

• No Direct Quotes from Other Sources: No language from outside sources was included verbatim, and all references to previous group ideas were rephrased or summarized to maintain originality.

• Emphasis on Plagiarism Avoidance: The prompt directed the AI to avoid using any direct language from the earlier white paper or any published articles to prevent copyright infringement and plagiarism.

• Ethical Standards: The draft was written with attention to ethical writing practices, transparency, and a commitment to the Repercussion Group’s values of honesty and integrity.
  

The result was a first draft that was consistent with the Repercussion Group’s prior work while being entirely original in its wording and specific in its focus on “Run It Straight.”