The optimistic side of me wants to think that exposure will ultimately lead to improvement
I'm surprised that the "alarm" is over the tourism and filming of it.
Not over us allowing people to self-destruct, which is what we do when we enable this behavior, which IS what we're doing right now. In San Francisco where I live we do this too. Plenty of "connected" charities making money and growing by serving the needs (addictions) of the drugged street population.
We need to be more alarmed at that, not at the exposing of it.
I’m not that surprised. It’s a stance which doesn’t require doing anything to solve the underlying issue, but lets people take a moral stance which feels somewhat humanitarian.
I'm surprised you assumed a headline captured a situation fully.
It is possible to be alarmed about more than one aspect of a situation, but decide to only focus on one part of it when telling a story.
People being homeless and doing drugs isn't news to me (sadly), so focusing on that in this piece would not have given me any new information. However, I had no idea that people were exploiting drugged-out homeless people for TikTok views; that was new information to me.
Experts seem to think the shame and misrepresentation actually makes the situation worse rather than doing anything to improve it, so curious what your thoughts are on the matter.