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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

There's a gigantic global industry of telling people that a far away place they've never been is bad and dangerous. This industry exists to make people overlook the objectively bad and dangerous place where they actually live. This plays out on global and national scale. For example, my family who live in Oklahoma City are constantly yapping about some fearmongering they saw about San Francisco, when their city has like 4x the homicide rate, traffic violence, poverty, substance abuse, even manmade earthquakes. But they are plugging into a 24x7 stream of disinformation.

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If you visit some place outside your local city, you might experience a broader swath of people, culture, and beliefs. That makes you a dangerous person. You might start questioning why you've only been told one thing. Sadly, just traveling within the US can get you some exposure, but it's mainly just variations of the same thing with perhaps some external influences that have been absorbed. It's nothing like going to abroad and experiencing totally different cultures.

Scary social media videos about those foreign lands is just another tool to dissuade people from wanting to expand their experiences. If you research into some of this global industry, you'll see a lot of the influencers are spokes from central hubs of propaganda sources that shockingly are financed by the same people.

Absolutely. Every country's local media will try to get people to stay home and spend money locally, and not complain because elsewhere is much MUCH worse!

It also makes it easier to dehumanize people in-case of a conflict.

This isn't limited to far-away places. There are plenty of influencers and social media shills that specifically parrot how bad cities are - to people who live in those cities. Hyper-local news outlets that no one outside of the city would read are filled with crime reports and people giving all kinds of warnings. Even decades ago, local news would excitedly report on crime because it draws viewers.

Almost every single large city subreddit needs to have some kinds of rules restricting crime posts, because people love to post every single act of crime that happens and it eventually takes over the sub. Then "alternative" subreddits are created and the cycle continues.

Scaring people has always been profitable, social media just lowers the bar. It's not just old people anymore.

I almost fell into one of these traps. It was a guy walking around the dead San Francisco mall and talking about how it was DEVASTATED and SF was COLLAPSING. I had actually been there recently and yes, it was pretty empty. The Youtube algorithm seized on this and started showing me more videos.

Except one of the videos was on a street next to me. The video was just the one guy walking around two blocks that were empty, but looped over and over for 20+ minutes. So it was clearly nonsense.

I checked his channel again. It has paid subscriptions and a PayPal link. He gets minimum 50K views on every single video, with some hitting 800K. He makes two a month. That's an easy income.

Everyone hates people who are not them. I live in a pretty plain middle class neighborhood just Southeast of downtown Dallas (oakcliff). People here talk about the absolute cesspools that are the... safest neighborhoods with good jobs and consistently top rated public schools in North Dallas only because they're also the wealthiest. They just can't stand people who are not like them for some reason.

To be fair the wealthy neighborhoods of North Dallas are notorious hotbeds of crime. It's just not the types of crimes that get reported on right-wing TV.

you'll have to give me some examples. My boys are 16 and 14 and have fortunately managed to get in to the top magnet HSs in DISD (TAG and SEM) but if i had to do it over again, and had the means, I'd choose to raise my kids in Preston Hollow/Highland Park any day.

Tax evasion, fraud, etc. Chiropractors organized as limited partnerships, that type of thing.

> Tax evasion

there's a lot more tax evasion going on in oakcliff and other working class neighborhoods than in any of the wealthier areas. Every other person in oakcliff pays with 100s at the grocery store, almost all business is cash under the table.

Imagine believing this.

I don't know anything about Oklahoma City but I'm pretty confident that SF is a shit hole having lived there up to 2024 and seeing it first hand every day. Any stats that claim otherwise are lying.

As a Eastern Europe citizen, I see absolutely no reason to visit western europe like “ever”.

Every time I did visit due to business or family trip, we were either mugged or pestered or cursed at.

Maybe visiting small villages is better but main cities are like “no-go” zones for civilized ppl.

You may not agree but I built this opinion on own experience and nothing will change it.

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