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Londoners are sick of viral videos telling lies about their city
- Arbortheus 7mo agoI’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. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgk86rr0vxyo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgk86rr0vxyo
- badgersnake 7mo agoIt’s all got a bit ridiculous. You can seemingly lie as much as you like on video sharing sites with zero comeback.
- hnlmorg 7mo agoThere’s no comeback for lying, period. Though if you happen to tell truths, or even just satire, against certain wealthy people, then you can expect the full fury of those hurt.
- dominotw 7mo agoi live in chicago. gun crime is localized to certain parts of city. Is it the same with knife crime?
- turkey99 7mo agoI’ve never seen any knife crime anywhere. There isn’t really any location. Its socioeconomic. It’s young black men 16-24 who disproportionately end up dying to knife crime.
- sourcegrift 7mo agoWhat are the root causes behind "socio-economic"?
- mothballed 7mo agoOne seems to be culture. For instance, I was caught between a knife fight on a train, because in one hood some of the culture is it's unacceptable to play another culture's music too loud. A Hispanic guy was playing hispanic music quite loud on the train, as soon as it entered a black neighborhood a black guy informed him it was "his hood" and asked him to stop, which then escalated to both pulling out knives. I have now learned there are certain socio-economic enclaves where culture has dictated that I must not play my music too loud or I will be stabbed to death.
- frereubu 7mo agoIn London? Where was this?
- mothballed 7mo agoSan Diego
- frereubu 7mo agoAh, gotcha - I misread.
- jasonmp85 7mo ago[dead]
- geysersam 7mo agoThere are many. It's an umbrella term for a range of circumstances that tend to be correlated with poverty and social issues. Low trust in society, few opportunities to improve economic situation, higher prevalence of trauma and ptsd, higher probability of substance abuse, low opportunity cost for going to jail, fewer good role models, worse self esteem, worse education outcomes, worse physical health, higher likelihood of being involved in organized crime, higher likelihood of depending on parallel social structures for safety and protection, etc. Each can be cause or effect in a self reinforcing network. Picking one single root cause isn't really possible.
- badgersnake 7mo agoI’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never seen any knife crime.
- cucumber3732842 7mo agoI live in "one of those parts" of "one of those cities" specifically to get away from white (in spirit if not also complexion) people with no real problems (or more specifically, what they do to a local government). As long as you don't make activities outside of the law a non-negligible source of your income or run with the crowd that does you're fine, and not just for murder or whatever, theft and all sorts of the boring "area under the curve" crime is concentrated around these people too.
- jeffbee 7mo agoFor homicide this is very correct. You could live dead center in the statistically most violent block of Chicago and still cut your personal risk of being a homicide victim by 1) not being a criminal, and 2) not posting diss raps to your 11 followers on Soundcloud. There are not really dangerous neighborhoods but there are dangerous social networks.
- doubled112 7mo agoI'm also a big believer that "head up, voice down" will reduce your likelihood of becoming a target. People don't usually bring trouble to themselves for no reason. Don't give them a reason.
- mothballed 7mo agoAnd not having any vehicle problems, because you usually only are rolling through bad areas to get to better areas. Most people in violent cities have no occasion to stop in violent areas. On one occasion I was forced to work overnight for critical hospital operations in a bad part of town, on my way back my tire went flat and when I was distracted fixing it the locals noticed I was weak and they put a gun to my head.
- jasomill 7mo agoLiving in Indianapolis (higher homicide rate than Chicago, but not drastically so), I feel the same way. And for non-homicide violent crime, you're probably more likely to get jumped on a side street near a bar district than you are in a "bad neighborhood" unless you do something yourself to incite violence.
- rcxdude 7mo agoViolent crimes in general in the UK (at least) are more localised to who you are. Random acts of violence on bystanders are very rare, the vast majority are attacks by someone known to the victim, often gang related.
- rob_c 7mo agoFlight 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...
- badgersnake 7mo ago> Flight from London is happening. That’s more to do with cost of living. Rents and house prices are insane.
- lazyasciiart 7mo ago> Flight from London is happening. It's already happened in a large way as well None of the people I've known who moved out of London did so because of crime or safety. They almost invariably moved because they could pay for a tiny place in the city and commute for over an hour each way or they could pay the same for a larger place outside the city and commute the same length of time on the train.
- jjgreen 7mo agoShhh, 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 ...
- tracker1 7mo agoAren't they trying to ban knives?
- Havoc 7mo agoThey've been trying forever - it's a futile exercise.
- defrost 7mo agoRegulate, not ban, not working knives (chef, ropemaker, tech, <reason>), but "zombie" knives and other "flash" used to swing in public and intimidate (subject, say to specific performance reasons, etc.) Love it, hate it, it's a different mindset to the US approach and ultimatelty falls back on judges using "reasonable behaviour" of common citizens on ominbuses as a yardstick.
- themaninthedark 7mo agoA rapper made a great song about this a while ago: https://youtu.be/YeV2cExvnMI?si=ZWhMBC1CDBGZHKNB https://youtu.be/YeV2cExvnMI?si=ZWhMBC1CDBGZHKNB Also from the comment section: "knife crime, knife crime, it's ain't about knives" You're saving that banning/ demonizing locking folding knives when almost all crimes are committed with a common kitchen knife wasnt the solution?!? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked!
- defrost 7mo agoHeh, great track. I mean it's no Linton Kwesi Johnson dis but it is what it is and that's enough. Look, no one's a fan of the village idiot juggling lit dynamite on a unicycle in the packed shopping mall, and it's no good for anyone if the bad apples* aren't given a route to better things to do so Roman Law countries tend to have any old excuse laws to give cause to have people questioned as to why they're doing whatever the heck it is that they're doing .. my grandmother pulled up kids all the time like that. The upside of such things is actually problematic and questionable bahaviour can be shunted in one direction and chefs of any colour, langauge, borough address can walk on proud and free with their knife rolls. The downside is the watchers and guardians can get a bit enthused and selective in their choices of collar, they can develop little clique's of weirdness and corruption, and the judgy types can get a bit overly judgy about all the wrong things. The challenge for any community is dealing with all that and having better control over the system .. takes time and focus, 'taint easy. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MVsBS7OZvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MVsBS7OZvo
- technothrasher 7mo agoEh, 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.
- themaninthedark 7mo agoI wouldn't say NYC is a hell hole but will say they(locals) don't seem to take crime that serious there, even violent crime. I was visiting last fall with the family, left the car in the NJ side when taking the ferry to the Statue. They took the train to the hotel and I went to retrieve the car, got a front stage view of a guy using a chain to beat up a security guard at a shopping mall. Guy had been peeing on the vehicles, guard told him to stop. He took offense at this, got a length of chain and started kicking the door so the guard would tell him to stop. As soon as he came out guy started hitting him over the head with the chain. Police took a good 15 to 20 minutes to respond, didn't seem interested in looking for the guy. The guard wasn't interested in pressing charges. Guy was probably homeless and definitely needed mental health but he had the capacity to plan out and execute a violent attack that could have been deadly.
- roughly 7mo agoBrother, 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.
- sixothree 7mo agoI 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.
- TitaRusell 7mo agoAmerica 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.
- londonnogood 7mo ago[flagged]
- javascriptfan69 7mo agoWe need a social media Nuremberg
- M95D 7mo agoToo bad legal persons can't be executed.
- jeffbee 7mo agoThere'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.
- givemeethekeys 7mo agoAbsolutely. 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.
- jerlam 7mo agoThis 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.
- mbgerring 7mo agoThis 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-ten-european-countries https://icct.nl/publication/russia-and-far-right-insights-te...
- specproc 7mo agoI 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.
- dhosek 7mo agoIt 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.
- specproc 7mo agoIs Putin the most powerful figure? It seems Bibi holds the most sway over Trump this month. Don't get me wrong, I've no love for Putin, but framing the Trump project as Russian misses the huge amount of American money and effort behind him. Is Musk a Russian agent? The Heritage Foundation? Fox? There's a huge, all-American infrastructure behind Trump 2.0. I'm sure plenty of countries did their very best to get that guy in the Whitehouse, but I don't buy that Putin is the main character here.
- Arodex 7mo agoMusk repeats verbatim Russian talking points about Ukraine. When he parrots the same ideas down to the exact same words in the exact same order, what doubt is there?
- rob_c 7mo agoIn 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".
- alsetmusic 7mo agoAnnie 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.
- dirtbagskier 7mo ago[dead]
- jzellis 7mo agoI'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.
- dtf 7mo agoAll 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.
- mhh__ 7mo agoIn 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-spencer-calls-crackdown-retail-crime-clapham 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.
- cedws 7mo agoNah, 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.
- mothballed 7mo agoIf you read the Code of Hammurabi you'll realize we haven't made any headway on property rights in 4000 years.
- badgersnake 7mo agoPhone snatching has been a problem, but it seems like the police have got on top of it of late. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20vlpwrzwdo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20vlpwrzwdo
- thrance 7mo agoSource?
- rcxdude 7mo agoYou 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.
- zimpenfish 6mo ago> 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.)
- Dig1t 7mo ago[flagged]
- bragr 7mo ago>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.
- dmoy 7mo agoSo 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.
- jerlam 7mo agoThe people these videos are targeting are not swayed by facts.
- dubeye 7mo agoAdvertising works
- amelius 7mo agoI 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.
- rsynnott 7mo agoThis 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).
- Fred27 7mo agoI 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.
- shantnutiwari 7mo agoWait 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?