Do Not Do This Cool Thing / Real Life

• Some cops took some pictures of an accident scene and, without the families' consent, showed them to kids, apparently wanting to Scare 'Em Straight. Instead, the kids thought they were cool and posted them. The families' attempts to get the pictures taken down only invoked the Streisand Effect.
• Abstinence-only sexual education:
  • It tends to be somewhat less than persuasive to high school students: sex is very physically and emotionally alluring while readily available contraception has greatly mitigated its potentially detrimental physical consequences; and its long-term personal and social consequences are rather abstract and particularly difficult for a Hormone-Addled Teenager to comprehend. In other words, the gratification that having sex offers is immediate and obvious, while the risks are all delayed and uncertain, and teens are notoriously short-sighted about the future. Worse is that these programs tend to condemn premarital sex in all forms, protected and unprotected alike, either refusing to acknowledge protection exists or wildly inflating how often it fails. The result is that teens in these programs have just as much sex, but get pregnant and spread diseases much more frequently than those taught how to use those easily available contraceptives.
  • This isn't to say that every pro-contraceptive sex-ed class nails it either. Portraying unprotected sex as reckless and worse, admitting that it feels awesome is an invitation for teenagers to try it. Some teenagers also have a romanticized view of teen pregnancy (or at least believe getting pregnant in their teens will let them get on television), especially the accidental sort. Really, any work that tells teenagers to not do stupid things runs into a risk of being this trope if they don't tread carefully and emphasize that the negative results of their actions also include being ostracized.
  • Many faith-based abstinence programs, rather than emphasizing abstinence as a form of self-control, and a virtue in its own right, often emphasize abstinence only as a means to an end: Abstain from sex now, and you'll be guaranteed to have a great sex life in marriage, which reinforces the hedonistic mindset that you're trying to work against.
  • Many vocations associated with sexual continence (e.g. priests, monks, nuns), at best, have very little prestige in society-at-large or, at worst, are associated with scandals (most infamously, sexually abusing minors) that show that said groups aren’t very good at staying abstinent themselves.
• This is why Driver's Education's attempts to dissuade reckless driving in teenagers is often ineffective. "If you drive recklessly, you'll have a ton of awesome stories to tell about all the times you almost died like a total badass. And if you do die, all your friends and family will spend all their time thinking and talking about you". The Texas DMV tried to subvert this by having PSAs claiming that if you are a careful driver, you'll be the one able to tell all the awesome stories about how your friends and classmates died. Morbid, but effective.
• Content Warnings. They're supposed to serve as warnings to parents about what's appropriate for kids, but it's impossible to stop the kids from seeing them, and all they think is, "If I'm not supposed to be exposed to it then it must be awesome." Indeed, back in The '90s when the Parental Advisory warning on CDs was just becoming well-known, TV advertisements for rap albums would proudly flash the "Tipper Sticker" as a point of pride, and George Carlin even recorded an album titled Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics—and there's a reason Rated M for Money is a trope.
• The Meese Report on pornography. The commission's conclusions on the harmful effects of porn were transparently determined by the prejudices of Edwin Meese et al. rather than actual analysis, while the report also included plenty of excerpts and juicy descriptions of otherwise hard-to-find material.
• PETA wants to put a mural on the Mexican border fence to "warn" Mexicans not to come to the US because they'll get fat from all the junk food and meat. The painting makes the USA look like a carnival-land made of candy and barbecues, turning the actual message into "Hey, we've got all the awesome delicious food you could ever want!" Yeah, that'll scare 'em away.
  • It's not like they were starving, anyway. Mexico is the among the fattest countries in the world, second only to the USA with the rare case of overtaking it, such as in 2013. Combine this with the explosion in the last few decades of cheap, fattening, nutrient-poor junk food, and you have, for the first time in history, a situation where the poor are fatter than the rich on average. Indeed, many health workers in the developing world have witnessed cases of people who are simultaneously obese and malnourished because of just how awful the local diets have gotten.
  • Another PETA misfire: "If you wouldn't eat a t-rex, don't eat a chicken.". The comments were overwhelmingly on the pro-dino eating side.
• Studies have suggested that kids who went through the D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program were actually more likely to do drugs than if they hadn't; the suggested explanation is this trope. Specifically, that the program focused so much on resisting peer pressure that the message morphed to "everyone is doing drugs but you", and the lessons about different types of drugs and their effects were almost like a consumer's guide to help you decide which drugs you might like to try. This led to a joke backronym for the group, Drugs Are Really Excellent.
• Hunter S. Thompson famously said, "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."^note At least up until he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound brought on by years of depression exacerbated by substance abuse.
• During the Cold War some Hollywood films were approved by the censors for release in the cinemas in the countries behind the Iron Curtain. Films were approved if they showed the US government in a bad light (evil CIA agents in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or the authorities in the first Rambo), featured evil capitalistic corporations (Aliens), or had any theme that could be portrayed in an anti-west manner (the West caused a world-wide apocalypse in The Terminator). The audience would end up being impressed by Western living standards.
  • The Grapes of Wrath: "This desperately poor family has its own truck?!"
• Chinese State Media outlet People's Daily posted propaganda that showed US President Joe Biden as the King of Hell on a throne of assault rifles and another image portraying the US military-industrial complex as a javelin-spitting Xenomorph. This stunt only made Joe Biden and America seem badass with the former image being appropriated by liberal activists to celebrate Biden as "Dark Brandon" after he signed into law progressive climate and health legislation.
• Newspapers often carry lifestyle or entertainment features that glamourise trends that their political journalism, editorials and opinion articles condemn. In Britain this is particularly pronounced in left wing newspapers - Editorial: "Global warming sucks!", Feature: "Look at all these glossy photos of a new super-car!". How much of a problem you think this is depends on how much you think the rational part of the brain is influenced by the impressionistic part.
• One of the Nazis' biggest propaganda mistakes was sending their "Gallery of Degenerate Art" on tour around the whole country so that all good loyal German citizens could see just how degenerate this art was for themselves. In terms of turnout, the tour was a smashing success: people turned out in droves in order to see for themselves just how degenerate all this art was. In terms of messaging, however, it was an abject failure: for some reason, this well-nigh pornographic degeneracy was always much more popular with people than the morally wholesome state-approved art the Nazis thought their loyal citizens ought to prefer.
• Yet another Nazi propaganda failure was their doctored picture of Winston Churchill inspecting a Tommy gun. The propaganda, much like a wanted poster, made Churchill out to be some Badass gangster swaggering with his cigar and submachine gun... and Churchill loved it!
• Bill Lee is a former Chinatown gangster who has written about his experiences. When his own son got involved in a gang, Lee told him about his experiences to keep him out of the gang. The son was just impressed that his dad and granddad were gangsters.
• Author Brian Solis offers this example of how someone can produce fake tweets that appear to be coming from celebrities, which of course is unethical and has disturbing implications for journalism, so you should never do it like he did to promote his first book.
• During Prohibition, there was a loophole that allowed vineyards to indirectly sell wine. They would sell bricks of grape concentrate and yeast that, when placed in water for an appropriate amount of time, would become wine. They often had "disclaimers" which stated: "Do not add water and leave in a dark place or it will ferment and turn to wine." Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
• One of the best selling books of the Restoration era was The Wandering Whore, a beautifully printed pocketbook that argues vociferously against prostitution in London's Covent Garden district. Except the booklet also includes long passages describing each one of the prostitutes working in Covent Gardens, their address, fee, appearance, and "specialty" in explicit detail...all such that "God-fearing men may better avoid them". It probably would not surprise anyone that this book later became Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, the Yellow Pages for the sex trade of 1700s London.
• Anti-bullying programs are now showing signs of actually encouraging bullying by—for instance—inadvertently teaching potential bullies new techniques for teasing and harassing their peers online.
  • One of the main criticisms of so-called Zero tolerance policies are that they unfairly punish the victim while offering no incentive for the instigators or abusers to stop. These policies have also been speculated to increase violent bullying and fighting in schools; bullies will continue to abuse their victims undeterred because they don't care about the punishments and enjoy getting their victims in trouble as well as themselves, while some victims, aware that they'll be sanctioned whether they defend themselves or not, feel that they have no choice but to resort to violence to try to fight back.
  • Same goes for books about social engineering. Sure, security personnel may benefit from reading these but so do con artists.
• To demonstrate how cold it was during the US's "polar vortex" of January 2014, NBC News threw a pot of boiling water in the air, which immediately froze. They warned viewers about doing the same at the time. When at least 50 copycat examples appeared on social media in which people scalded themselves or others, NBC even more urgently cautioned viewers not to repeat the trick... as they repeated showing that cool clip.
• This is the essence of Marshal Marmont's lessons to the Duke of Reichstadt, Napoleon's son. He gave the Duke firsthand account of his father's brilliant campaigns, detailing his tactics and strategies, while emphasizing that this example was not to be emulated at all - partly because most of Napoleon's victories were at the expense of the Emperor of Austria, who also happened to be Reichstadt's grandfather. The Duke ended up dreaming that he could one day take power in France and restore the country to its former glory.
• Anytime the RIAA or MPAA takes a public stance to warn internet users that downloading unlicensed media from torrent sharing sites because "they will get viruses from them", the general reaction from the internet is usually "thank you for telling us about these torrent sites we weren't aware of."
• There are theories that this phenomenon is responsible for some school shootings and other high-profile mass killings because much of the media reporting on such crimes focus on the killers and their motivations. While the reports are to show that the kinds of people who would do such things are mentally ill and/or evil, some people (particularly those who are already mentally ill) instead take the message as "if I kill a bunch of people, I'll get on TV and be famous!". Instead, some people advocate avoiding talking about the killers as much as possible in news reports, and instead focus on promoting the memory of the victims.
  • A particular example was the Columbine shooting, where much of the later media response played up the Tragic Monster aspects of the event, claiming that the violence of the shooters stemmed from them being bullied loners (which is dubious at best on several levels), hoping to push towards reconciliation and encouraging both bullies and bullied to be more open. As it turned out, this backfired twice over; bullies heard that the unpopular kids they bullied were spree-killers-in-waiting and therefore had it coming, and unpopular kids found an icon in the shooters for "striking back".
• Many retail stores in the US have large posters in the employee lounge telling them to stop the meth problem by reporting "any large purchases of the following items" to the DEA. While it's meant to curb meth production, it also tells the low-paid worker "Here are the things you'll need to start a meth lab!".
• Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a cycle of radio plays on the life of Christ for the BBC. The Lord's Day Observance Society thought that the idea was blasphemous, and inveighed against it. All this resulted in was more people than would otherwise have done so tuning in to see what all the fuss was about. Sayers, in the preface to the published book of the scripts, thanked the LDOS for the publicity; since in her youth she had worked in an advertising agency, she knew that there is No Such Thing as Bad Publicity.
• Although Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmeister spoke openly about his vices (smoking, alcohol, drugs, groupies) and hard-partying lifestyle, he did not encourage others to follow his example because he'd seen too many of his friends die from living the way he lived. It probably doesn't help, however, that the message "If you live like I do, you'll die young" is slightly dampened when you remember that Lemmy lived to be 70.
• Legend has it that the reason lesbianism was never outlawed in the UK was because Parliament thought it would give women ideas. Or perhaps because, in the popular imagery, it didn't look bad.
• Early gay and lesbian pulp fiction were forced to portray gays as disturbed, deviant and/or doomed to get pass censorship, but many LGBT+ people who otherwise lacked representation in media or access to information about homosexuality eagerly bought the books.
• The exhibition "Oto Ameryka" (This Is America), organized in Communist Poland back in 1952, was meant to show the degeneracy, racism, and all-around moral collapse supposedly widespread in the US. It was wildly popular — the people were glad to see anything American, and they ended up highly impressed by how high the standards of living seemed there, even when depicted through propaganda intended to paint that lifestyle as a bad thing. Among other things, notable Polish comic book artist Grzegorz Rosinski was first inspired to start drawing by seeing a snippet of an American comic in the exhibition catalogue; comic books were still considered capitalist degeneracy back then, and there was nothing like them available in Poland at the time.
• Soviet media (and those of their satellites) focused a lot on jazz music, portraying it and the life style built around as being symbolic of the wasteful capitalist lifestyle. Russia and more or less other former Communist countries still have a taste for jazz long after it’s faded to a more niche genre in its country of origin. It's safe to say that the anti-jazz propaganda failed spectacularly.
• The movement to legalize recreational marijuana in Canada (made official in 2018) led to a huge amount of this in the Canadian media, with outlets running stories like "How pot smoking could be a new bonding ritual for elderly parents and their children" and how pot is going to be a cash cow for Canadians alongside stories citing issues related to health concerns about second hand smoke and impaired driving. This despite the federal government indicating that one purpose in legalizing was to remove the "cool factor" from recreational pot.
• In July 2018, the mayor of Los Angeles posted a video on Twitter to explain the city's ban on fireworks, showing how even a small firework can blow up something as large as a watermelon. So don't play with fireworks, kids, or you might get to see some freakin' awesome explosions like this one!
• The usage of flares in European football stadiums is both popular among diehard fans as well as very forbidden. And whenever one does get smuggled inside and ignited during the match, the cameras will definitely linger on the impressive view of illegal pyrotechnics for a few moments.
• This news story from New York City: "Federal Judge Wants to Climb Statue of Liberty Before Sentencing Protester Who Climbed It Last Year."
  "Additionally, if it were deemed possible and safe, the Court would like a ladder to be made available so the Court (and counsel if requested) can view, while remaining on the ladder, the surface of the area where the defendant was situated on July 4, 2018," the order read.
• Conservative commentator Benny Johnson tweeted a video of himself traveling to Cuba and coming across a supermarket to show the poor state there. He claimed that the store seemed to stock nothing but Brand X items in identical packaging, claiming that this was a sign of an uncompetitive market and the evils of socialism. Most commentators pointed out that the supermarket was well-stocked, spotless, and had reasonable-looking prices, which isn't half bad for a country under infamously heavy embargoes. Others even said they found the identical packaging to look much more convenient than American supermarket's varied packaging. It was easy to assume that Johnson had thought the market would be poorly stocked or in a state of disrepair, and was reduced to nitpicking when it turned out to be the opposite. And the vast majority of brands in the US are owned by a handful of companies, so they're not a good gauge of a competitive market anyway.
• The Sun columnist Dan Wootton tweeted about the set menu at the 2020 Golden Globes being entirely vegan. Many people mocked him for trying to make it seem like the vegans were forcing their lifestyle on others because A) the photos showed the vegan meals as being immaculately presented, and B) having a vegan-only menu at a ceremony that only celebrities could attend (many of whom, if not vegan themselves, were liberal enough to likely not care either way) is hardly an attack on civil liberties, where any of the 18 million people watching the Golden Globes from home could still buy and eat whatever they pleased while doing so.
• Pegs on BMX bikes. Even though safety education programs universally recommend against kids giving each other rides on bicycles and other such shenanigans, it's conceivable that 0.1% of the usage of BMX pegs is for trained BMX riders to do tricks, and 99.9% of their usage is for kids to do stupid stuff with them. The argument that they are actually intended only for legitimate tricks done by BMX riders might actually hold water if the pegs were only put on designer bicycles that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, but even affordable department store bicycles have them.
• Why the University of Pittsburgh created Mr. Yuk symbol. The traditional skull and crossbones symbol for poison-warning signals was associated with pirates, and therefore considered "cool" and thus wouldn't warn kids away from poison. The symbol itself is a Green Is Gross colored face with a disgusted expression.
• At the end of a concert in Reading, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana somehow managed a crossover of this trope with Smoking Is Cool. Specifically, he was giving a young fan an autograph while holding a lit cigarette in his hand and very earnestly told the fan, who he didn't want to see picking up a particularly lethal habit, "Don't smoke."
• Fox News's special report on 4chan was meant to encourage people to fear and avoid them. However this involved hyping them as hackers on steroids who could blow up vans with their computer and scare someone enough they needed to buy a dog to defeat them, making them seem like cool badasses who could do the impossible, while also making Fox look even more out of touch.
• This is what led to "This is the future liberals want" becoming a meme. The far-right Twitter account "/pol/ News Network" posted this message alongside a photo of a woman wearing a niqab sitting on a train next to a Drag Queen, showing it as a bad thing. Instead, people noticed that it showed the LGBTQ and Muslim communities (two groups that aren't known for tolerating each other well) coexisting peacefully, and thought it was a good thing (which is what the photo, originally taken as a symbol of diversity, was intended to represent before being warped into the opposite and back.)
• In 2023, the New York City Police Department released a slideshow intended to serve as a warning on "ghost guns"/3D-printed homemade firearms. For whatever reason, the slideshow (available to the public) includes an entire section on how to make said contrabrand, going insofar as to recommend specific 3D printers and brands of polymer.
• During Prohibition, raisin manufacturers included warnings on their packaging to discourage people from making homemade raisin wine with their products, but the warnings were detailed enough that they basically functioned as instructions on how to make raisin wine.

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