▲ 83 points
back
103 comments
This book doesn’t cover the UK specifically, but it does detail Russia’s well-publicized strategy of promoting reactionary media narratives to destabilize the United States and the EU. I feel like at some point, people will need to start taking this seriously, instead of continuing to act like people suddenly just started telling insane racist lies on the internet for no reason. https://icct.nl/publication/russia-and-far-right-insights-te...
It's pretty weird that on the one hand they don't acknowledge that propaganda actually works, yet on the other hand let ad-tech exist because "where would we be without it?"
I always wonder why people zoom in on Russia, when there's so much America involved.
Trump and Musk are constantly targeting London and Khan on social media, but sure, it's the Russians driving this.
And now you have moved the argument away from Russia. Pulling a thread off-topic like that is one of their simplest strategies. It begs for engagement.
Another big driver, which TFA mentions, is that outrage drives both clicks and repeat visits. There are lots and lots of people in it purely for the money, including Americans. It's nothing political, it's purely the profit motive. Then the reward functions on FB and YT direct people towards content that appalls or outrages, disturbing videos, conspiracy theories, bigotry. For FB the ideal user is one who's been sucked into a vortex of conspiracy theories and spends all their time on FB.
When I say it's apolitical I mean the con artists know exactly who to target, which is the right, because you can feed them anything and they'll keep coming back for more. It's far harder with the left, they'll say "this is all bullshit" and move on quickly, there's no money to be made there. There was a great interview a few years back with a California-based troll who said he targeted the right because that's where you got the responses: "We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out".
"Nothing personal, it's just business".
It seems to me like a lot of the American stuff is people directly or indirectly under Russian influence or part of an international network of extreme-right politics of which Putin is the most powerful figure.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant. When you start hiding your problems and blaming those who expose them, you are on a spiral which only goes down.
It doesn't matter if your enemy also wants to promote this. If you follow this line of thought, you have to support the government of China censoring the Tiananmen Square massacre. Because their enemies in the West have for decades been talking about it.
>There was the person with the relative in Los Angeles who was worried about going to London
This amused me because living in LA/California, I get the same style unhinged comments completely disconnected from the reality of what is happening here. We certainly have our share of problems, but you'd think we're Somalia the way certain people talk. I had a friend from Arkansas visit last summer and it definitely reset his world view a bit.
I assume this is all just deflection. It is more politically convenient to talk about bad roads or the homeless problem in California, than to address that your state's schools are in the bottom 20% of the nation.
Annie Kelly recently hosted an episode of the QAA podcast about this exact phenomenon. People come to London and video themselves walking around with “scary” people around them. It’s mostly a bunch of fear-bait garbage.
The episode is titled “London Has Fallen (E356)” and was released on Jan 26 of this year. Worth a listen.
So London homicide rate is 1.1 per 100k? That's substantially lower than New Hampshire, Maine, and Idaho, which have the lowest homicide rates in the US.
Does seem like much ado about nothing.
The people these videos are targeting are not swayed by facts.
Nah, there's a lot of truth to it. Phone snatching and looting is common but underreported because nothing ever happens. I've travelled quite a lot and other than Brussels, London (my home city) is the only one where I'm cowering and shielding my phone for fear it will be snatched. I can't leave my bag or laptop out of sight for even a second.
Petty crime chips away at society by eroding trust, it needs to be punished Singapore style.
You don't generally stop such crimes by punishing them more harshly, you stop them by punishing them more consistently, which is a more expensive solution.
Phone snatching has been a problem, but it seems like the police have got on top of it of late.
If you read the Code of Hammurabi you'll realize we haven't made any headway on property rights in 4000 years.
> London (my home city) is the only one where I'm cowering and shielding my phone for fear it will be snatched
I've been in London for the better part of 30 years now and have had a mobile phone for most of that time. Until the last couple of years, I was out and about all the time, usually with my phone, and I've had someone attempt to snatch it precisely twice.
> Petty crime chips away at society by eroding trust
That I do agree with.
> it needs to be punished Singapore style
That I do not. What we do need is a proper accounting of all crimes at all levels of society - "the fish rots from the head down" after all. When people see people in power getting away with crimes, blatant lies, and other bad behaviours, they'll often follow because why not?
(cf Trump, Johnson, Putin, et al.)
Source?
All I know is, it's the end of the long Easter weekend, the sun came out to play yesterday and today and London has been looking very fine indeed.
I'm an American who lives just outside London in Watford, and I'm 17 minutes from Euston Station by train. I have been all over the city and never felt unsafe or nervous or even the need to be especially vigilant. When people say there's "gun crime" here they mean that once every few months someone fires a gun and it makes the national news. I've lived all over the American West and it's safer than even the rural towns I've lived in. All of this stuff is hilariously overblown, and when other British people talk about how dangerous London is, keep in mind it's like Farmer Giles talking about how Hobbiton is too big and full of futtiners who talk funny. To an American it's hilarious. It's, like, kids with boxcutters. For anyone who's ever lived in an American city like LA, this really is the Shire. It's all right-wing propaganda cooked up by Faragewald Mosley and his Temu bootboys.
For people who make their entire personalities about what their grandpa did in the War, they're sure seem hellbent on acting exactly like the people he did it to.
I'm a brit who was born in and lives in Watford. I was mugged at knifepoint on oxford street in 2019, and have personally witnessed multiple phone thefts. Non-fatal knife crime is very high, the statistics don't lie in that regard. I hope you don't have the right to vote, because your denial of reality is doing irreparable harm to my country.
This happens with Dublin (capital of Ireland), as well. Half the country outside Dublin seems to think it's pretty much a warzone, based on internet nonsense.
Not sure what can be done about any of this, beyond people _hopefully_ getting more sceptical about random crap they see on the internet (my vague feeling is that unquestioningly believing crap on the internet is primarily an older-person thing).
I think it is great that these videos are teaching people not to trust random (viral) videos. We need more of these blatant lies, so people wake up everywhere.
We need a social media Nuremberg
Too bad legal persons can't be executed.
Wait till you hear about what these influencers do in India.
They will go to the shittiest, poorest slum where even other Indian won't go to, make a video titled something like "Oooh look at these disgusting Indians" and get hundreds of millions of views.
In effect, making fun of poor people for clicks.
Shit posting and lying works, and platforms encourage it (by sending views and money), so why wouldn't people do it?
Advertising works
I’m fed up of Americans telling me London is full of knife crime when the stats say that it is much worse in the USA.
The situation is even improving, UK homicide rates are at the lowest level in 50 years [1].
Not to mention that the USA has an entire category of gun crime which is a non-issue in the UK.
I swear to you, London is not an unsafe city.
Brother, I live in Oakland. To hear it from the media, statistically I’ve been dead for a decade now. This is always the narrative around cities, which is fine, because it keeps away the kinds of people who find my town scary instead of invigorating.
I got stuck at a table with a Fox News viewer who was absolutely angry about the "situation" in England and Europe. He was so focused on the Muslim immigration epidemic causing people to be unsafe and was greatly concerned about how they treat their women. Yes, I see the irony of a fox news viewer being concerned about how women are treated.
It was eye opening to me just how deeply brainwashed these people are. This wasn't just him parsing news events, it was his world view being shaped with the opinion that these are awful, dangerous, unsafe places, ridden with crime and poverty.
It’s all got a bit ridiculous. You can seemingly lie as much as you like on video sharing sites with zero comeback.
Eh, that same group of American folks also say that NYC is a violent crime ridden hell hole. I'm a rural guy who actively dislikes cities, but even still I've never actually felt unsafe in the time I've spent in either NYC or London.
Shhh, you should be egging them on with some outlandish tales of a close escape ... then there might be a seat or two in the pubs on a Saturday night ...
Aren't they trying to ban knives?
i live in chicago. gun crime is localized to certain parts of city.
Is it the same with knife crime?
America is running a disinformation campaign against Europe.
Europe represents democracy and rule of law- something right wing fascists and Christian fundamentalists despise.
Make no mistake we are involved in an ideological war against the US.
Flight from London is happening. It's already happened in a large way as well.
You don't see cockney anything anywhere there anymore compared to (and as much as you see any transitional regional identify left in) other British cities.
Homicide is on the drop in London but that's not 100% because it's safer. A huge amount is focused on deaths rather than attacks so don't fool yourself that just because they didn't die that nothing happened.
> crime which is a non-issue in the UK.
Nope. Not even close to true. Yes we don't have school shooters. Yes we don't have people exacting "justice" with a loaded barrel. But we do have gun crime and guns are used a LOT as intimidation. I wish I didn't grow up in an area where I know that to be true.
Trying to pretend there's not a problem is wonderful. And in that case I can point you to some very reasonably priced areas which must be perfectly safe and have no social cohesion issues at all regardless of where you're from...
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.
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.
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.
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.
In defense of London from London...
Frankly if that's not an example of Stockholm syndrome I don't know what is.
It's so far from the nicest city on the country. It's entirely held up by "drip down" wealth from the banks and tourism which to paraphrase Chinese airways "avoid certain areas".
In turn I'm sick of myopic fools using foreign stupidity to cover up the undeniable truth that there is a huge problem with petty crime and anti-social behaviour in london e.g. the boss of M&S wrote a letter on this just recently
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/03/marks-spenc...
> I keep hearing crime is falling, especially in London - something none of us believe and very few people working in retail would see. In fact, we see the absolute opposite in our High Streets and in our stores, where our colleagues are on the receiving end of abuse and violence in their workplace every day.
> It is becoming more brazen, more organised and more aggressive.
> Across the UK, there were around 5.5 million incidents of shoplifting last year, and that excludes the vast number that go unreported. Every day, more than 1,600 retail workers face violence or abuse. This is not isolated. It is systemic and it is getting worse, not better.
I was born in London, lived in London until about 15 years ago and still go there a few times a year. It really has become as bad as people make out.
One thing that brought it home to me was recently re-watching 28 Days Later. As the main character comes out of hospital and walks over a Zombie-apocalyse London Bridge, I thought "Wow. That looks nice." London in 2026 is worse that Zombie-apocalyse London from 2002.