This isn't true at all in general online discourse. Maybe on X, in which case I'd recommend getting off of X.

It's overwhelmingly brought up when talking about Japan (and sometimes Korea) in comparison to the US (or EU). With Japan (or Korea) being the high-trust culture in that comparison, and the US/EU being the low-trust one.

I guarantee you can do a search across mentions of high/low-trust culture across online platforms in the last 12 months and the large majority will be these contexts, i.e. Western countries described low-trust, not high-trust.

Huh, TIL. Thanks for pointing it out.

I feel like it used to be an effective dog whistle, but has ceased to be since Trump and company came around.