Josie asks the same question to what feels like the tenth person. This time it’s to a local woman, sitting at a table in her shop in Siwa, a village 800 km from Cairo.
“What would you say to anyone who thinks Egypt is full of scammers?”
The woman answers patiently. She says that everywhere has its bad apples, and if you generalise, you get it wrong.
Josie is making a YouTube video to find out whether online warnings about Egypt being unsafe or scam-ridden are true.
Every time Josie asks this question, I cringe. Rolled up in it is an insulting message about Egypt and Egyptian people that is loaded with prejudice and lazy generalisations.
She’s right when she says there’s an online narrative. Her video is aimed at countering it, but even though the content of the video shows her encounters with harmless tour guides, and kind, hospitable people, she still labels her video: “100 hours in the scam capital of the world, as a woman.”
The video is clearly meant to be in conversation with the other popular travel vlogs on YouTube – the ones that paint Cairo as dangerous or scam-ridden, and also happen to be the most watched.
It makes me wonder, is the advertising model funding cultural prejudice?
Advertising doesn’t require the content creator to be ethical, fair, or truthful – the way sponsors do. The more inflammatory, dramatic or fear-based, the more the creator gets paid. In a way, it’s like British tabloids – who profit from sensationalism, and moral panic, regardless of accuracy.
But it’s still better than the tabloids, because the same system can support independent travel vloggers who can at least show a different side of a place.
Response
[…] and pointing out everyone else’s flaws. But as most Egyptians told the vlogger Josie, everywhere has its bad apples. In this case, though, only one of these apples has a YouTube channel influencing the opinion of […]