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.