The only videos/pictures I mainly see of India don’t explicitly try to show india in a negative light, but implicity do. Stuff like videos of people using their bare feet as tools to work on items, unsanitary restaurant conditions, etc.
I’ve never been to India (on my list), I love Indian people, their culture, and especially their food. Because of that, I’m relatively certain those videos are hand picked to go viral, but I don’t have anything real to compare it to (my own experience). But also, the disgust seems very manufactured, with frequent racist comments as well in those posts.
Has anybody else noticed this?
It’s not a specifically Indian issue, it’s generalized. It’s also not intentional, just a result of the way virality works.
Because the clips most likely to go viral are those that agree with stereotypes (fat American, lazy Mexican, drunk Russian, thieving Romanian, etc ad infinitum), those are the ones you see. Then people make more of them because it’s an easy way to get clicks. They’re popular because they reliably cause the same arguments (and thus engagement).
The machine does not care about anything but maximizing eyeballs on their platforms.
To play devil’s advocate, there are more videos that show these stereotypes than not. To quote racists everywhere, “stereotypes exist for a reason”. But it’s important to remember that humans everywhere are literally almost identical, and the reason stereotypes exist is worth looking into in order to acknowledge why we might have inherent biases. In OPs example, India is poor as fuck, and a lot of people just don’t have shoes because of that history of wealth inequity