[Zenzero]

> we still absolutely ridicule people who’d believe in most of the nonsense so that keeps it down

I think that's a major source of the problem here in the US. We have gotten away from outright calling stupid people stupid. The morons spouting the conspiracy theories, the emotionally charged stories, and the anti-intellectual nonsense do not deserve time or consideration. Yet we continue to be sensitive to their screeching about censorship and bias. Let them screech all they want. Their opinions don't matter.

[devjab]

We do have the advantage of being a very small country by comparison. Social Media made it worse because the village idiots suddenly had a place to form communities with other village idiots. None of us live far from each other though, you can drive from one end of our country to the other in around 5 hours. So it’s almost impossible to not be mixed up with all sorts of people. I think the “ghettos” we have that are the most isolated are actually the rich people. The rest of us are all mixed in together.

We don’t really have a “rural” area as such. In the way you will have in huge countries like America. We obviously the the same urbanisation everyone else has, and the issues which comes with it. Even if you live in the parts of the country which are “left behind” or however it’s described you’re still very likely to have neighbours who work in a large city that just wanted a “country side” home. Which is possible because 95% of our rural non island areas are typically less than an hour in car from one of our major cities.