You know what always floors me about Canada, the amount of racism and hate there actually is here. You're made to believe it's this amazing cultural melting pot that is accepting of everyone and while it is for a lot, there's also a massive rise in how many that aren't happy about that being the case anymore. Lately I've noticed this intense rise in South Asian hate, I dug into this a little more, it seems before this the focus was on how the Chinese were taking over the lower mainland and how Richmond was basically China, the signage, the jobs that require you to speak Mandarin or Cantonese when trying to work in Richmond or even parts of Burnaby now, but that seemed to taper off for the new focus of hating South Asians, which I find odd because it's filled with some intense vitriol and more so than the hate Asians were getting by a large margin. I mean every "group" has its bad apples but the way each social media platform is taken over locally by this rampant hate is just astounding.
My wife is on tik tok and all the social media platforms you can post messages on - Instagram, Tik tok, Threads, X, etc. She follows mostly local things because of her work and because she still likes exploring this place. We look at the food places because Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby have some amazing small local restaurants that rival some of the over hyped Michelin bs restaurants over seas and in the US and occasionally you follow these Vancouver hot spots and news and anytime it's an accident or an incident in Richmond or Surrey, holy shit is it vile.
I also noticed the moderating on those comments is next to non-existent. If you mention certain wars going on for certain countries, you see that content moderated to death, but legitimate hate comments are almost never taken down. I told me wife to report a couple of comments out of curiosity, these were so blatantly over the line comments that it'd get anyone here banned permanently, we took screenshots to see if it was going to get taken down and saved the post for reference. A week went by, got a notification that it didn't violate any rules, so we pulled up the rules, it did violate it and we also learned they use an AI to moderate.
You know, the biased AI towards poc that even Google had a hard time explaining, that Instagram moderators specifically program to look for certain things, which apparently isn't to moderate racist comments towards Asians, South Asians, Black, or Latino's.
I think one of the craziest I saw was this one video my wife showed me on Tik tok of a truck driver that flipped his truck and ran into something, immediately the comments were "this is the new canada with these new Indian immigrants that cheat to get licenses" and the bloke in the truck which you see in the video is caucasian. Some are definitely bots, but some have their literal names and links to their instagram accounts and are mom's and dad's and teenagers, it's just so vile.
It sucks having to follow these accounts, I mean cool we got to find a place called Say Mercy! off of Fraser and King Edward, fantastic Italian cuisine, mediocre Negroni's though, but then we see the comments on an Indian restaurant and it's like wow...grow the f*** up people. My wife and I still get the bs being Black (bi-racial but no one knows until they get to know me and ask) and my wife being Vietnamese but American born, eventually we just become numb and blind towards it after a while, just ignoring the looks or off hand comments, but you'd think at least on social media where there's kids being heavily influenced by the garbage people post, that they'd moderate it better. Don't even get me started about how these OF tossers exploit hashtags, my wife's friend was telling me how her son is 12 and he loves lego so he followed lego hashtags and the parents monitor his account as they're able to on Instagram, well she showed me how these OF peddlers will post thirst traps as being lego fans with a "spicy link" on their page, so kids being kids and curious...it's like you can be careful and idiots will still find a way to affect you because they don't care how they negatively impact others with their behavior.
Maybe the current "political" hate towards people has me angry enough to talk about this without getting into politics but seriously, it's gotten bad everywhere.
/Rant