Since the Taliban returned to power, control over Afghanistan has extended beyond checkpoints and laws to the images outsiders see. A wave of influencers, vloggers and travelers publish short videos that frame the country as “safe,” “peaceful” or “nothing like the news.” Clips with titles such as “Afghanistan is not what you think” circulate widely on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, showing busy streets, friendly encounters and casual interactions with armed men. At a glance these look like personal travelogues. Closer inspection reveals a carefully curated image that hides who can move freely and who is systematically excluded—above all, Afghan women.
What these creators produce is not simply an alternate truth but a staged narrative I call performative safety. They film in controlled spaces where ordinary life can appear undisturbed, and they omit the mechanisms that make that appearance possible: checkpoints, gendered restrictions, detained educators, and the social policing that keeps women out of public life. The result is a media product optimized for surprise and shareability, not representativeness. In an attention economy that rewards content that flips expectations, the portrayal of a calm Afghanistan becomes especially clickable. Algorithms then amplify these scenes, helping them pass as typical rather than exceptional.
The safety on display is profoundly unequal. Foreign visitors—especially men, and some foreign women—can move in ways denied to most Afghan women. While Afghan women face bans from schools, work, and many public spaces, visiting foreigners may dine in restaurants, pose for photos with armed figures, or joke with officials. High-profile incidents, like visits by Western entertainers, underline this double standard: the same public squares that are off-limits or surveilled for local women are presented as open when occupied by outsiders. Treating these exceptions as normal flattens the structural, gendered exclusion that shapes daily life.
This staging is a matter of selection. Video creators choose what to show and what to erase: the scarcity or absence of women in markets, the checkpoints that constrain movement, the threats against activists and teachers—these elements rarely appear in upbeat reels. By omitting them, a limited, conditional experience is transformed into a seemingly general social reality. When the dominant visual narrative of Afghanistan becomes calm and ordinary, it diminishes the perceived severity of the regime’s restrictions and makes authoritarian control look livable.
Representation here does political work. Whether intentional or not, these portrayals lower the symbolic cost of repression. If Taliban fighters are shown as friendly, ordinary, or even comic, the system they uphold recedes from view. Violence, exclusion and coercion go unseen, and audiences are less likely to judge or resist the underlying politics. In that sense, influencers can become unwitting participants in a broader project of normalizing a repressive order.
There are real-world consequences. In contexts of opaque governance and weak legal protections, videos that normalize travel risk encouraging unprepared viewers to visit. Evidence from other authoritarian settings shows that foreign nationals can be detained or exploited for political leverage; in Afghanistan, with limited accountability, those risks are acute. The distance between a viral image and on-the-ground consequences can collapse: what begins as shareable content can lead people into danger.
Intent is not the only issue. Many creators sincerely believe they are correcting sensationalist media, but effect matters more than motive. By excising repression and the everyday reality of Afghan women from their frames, creators help legitimize exclusionary practices. Representation is an ethical act: it can expose oppression or erase it, and too often these videos do the latter.
Platform dynamics help explain why this content proliferates. Algorithms favor novelty, emotional impact and short, sharply edited narratives—formats ill-suited to explaining layered, structural gendered repression. Creators respond to these incentives, producing reductive portrayals that maximize engagement even when they obscure serious human-rights problems.
What would more responsible visual practice look like? First, provide context: name who is absent from the frame and why, and acknowledge the permissions and gatekeeping that make certain shots possible. Second, highlight power differentials: make explicit that foreign bodies can access spaces denied to local women. Third, exercise restraint: resist monetizing surprise at the expense of accuracy and consider how images might inspire risky behavior among viewers.
This is not just a debate about truthfulness. It is about how images reshape reality by deciding what to show and what to hide. When influencers produce a dominant narrative of calm, they do more than tell stories—they take part in a politics of visibility that can normalize repression and marginalize the experiences of those most affected. Representation, in this context, becomes a form of power that determines what repression can conceal and what the world is permitted to ignore.