I strongly disagree that we should avoid doing a thing just because the optics/vibes of it might not be mainstream, or that it requires people to change what they're doing.

I am also strongly against "we shouldn't do this because it is culturally insensitive." There are lots of cultural practices I find abhorrent (e.g., female genital mutilation). I don't care if stopping it "offends" other people. Cultures are perfectly capable of promoting very bad practices. 

This is not trying to do the most good with limited resources. This is "trying to do the most good with limited resources, subject to the constraint of not making some people angry or seeming too weird." 

(For what it's worth, I voted fairly strongly on the side of spending on more on global health as opposed to animal welfare.)

I'm not sure I understand: on one side, we have a stronger obligation to those close to us, but on another side, it is good to help strangers that are thousands of kilometers away

I don't see how this is contradictory? For example, you might prefer saving 10 American lives to saving 11 non-American lives, but prefer saving 100 non-American lives to 5 American lives.

That and the anti-expanding moral circle argument suggests that it's OK (and in fact, in my opinion, good) to assign different weights to different entities.

I don't believe in complete impartiality. I think we have a stronger moral obligation to those who are closer to us--be it family, friends, or co-nationals. The vast majority of my donations have gone to global health simply because it is much much more cost-effective to help the poorest in the world. 
 

I also think that a blind push to expand the moral circle is misguided. See: https://gwern.net/narrowing-circle.

Effective Shrimps

>Lobbying isn't BribingWell because it isn't BribingDirectly.
Incredible

I am planning on giving a talk in EAGxBerkeley on this topic! There's a paper that is media RCT that looks at randomly showing Ugandan children a motivational movie (The Queen of Katwe) versus a placebo movie (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children). Watching the Queen of Katwe has a persistent and significant effect on educational outcomes of girls. It reduces chance that a femal student in 10th grade fail math from 32% to 18%, increased the chances that a 12th grade female student apply to college by 15 percentage points (which closes the gender gap between girls and boys), and does a bunch of other good stuff (see here: https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01153 )

Here's the link to the slides if anyone is interested: https://timhua.me/eagx.pdf