Tribe addicted to porn thanks to cell phones was fake news.

Brookswood

Brookswood

Senior Member
It seems that the NY Times story about a village in the Amazon that got cell phones was falsely used to claim that the tribe had become addicted to porn. Nothing in The NY Times article suggest or claimed that cell phones were causing a porn addiction in the tribe. Yet, some news source falsely spread this fake information apparently without first reading the actual NY Times story or maybe even ignoring the reality of what they a read.

According to a follow up NYTimes article:

No, a Remote Amazon Tribe Did Not Get Addicted to Porn

The Marubo people are not addicted to pornography. There was no hint of this in the forest, and there was no suggestion of it in The New York Times’s article.
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We have to be diligent and not jump to any conclusion based on social media and the news media. The more hysterical or outrageous the news seems, the more careful we need to be.

Over the past week, more than 100 websites around the world have published headlines that falsely claim the Marubo have become addicted to porn. Alongside those headlines, the sites published images of the Marubo people in their villages.

The New York Post was among the first, saying last week that the Marubo people was “hooked on porn.” Dozens quickly followed that take. TMZ’s headline was perhaps the most blunt: “TRIBE’S STARLINK HOOKUP RESULTS IN PORN ADDICTION!!!”
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These repurposed reports are designed to use with clickbait.

“Many of the sites that distorted this detail are news aggregators, meaning their business model is largely designed around repackaging the reporting of other news organizations, with often sensationalist headlines to sell ads.

Because these sites also link to the original reporting, they are generally legally protected, even if they misrepresent the material.”

Any news reports have to be read carefully nowadays.
 
One wonders if some AI was hallucinating when it described the Times story.

AI hallucinations are legend. I especially like the one about mixing glue into the pizza sauce to keep the cheese from sliding off the slice.
 
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Jules said:
These repurposed reports are designed to use with clickbait.

“Many of the sites that distorted this detail are news aggregators, meaning their business model is largely designed around repackaging the reporting of other news organizations, with often sensationalist headlines to sell ads.

Because these sites also link to the original reporting, they are generally legally protected, even if they misrepresent the material.”

Any news reports have to be read carefully nowadays.
Click to expand...
when I was younger it never occurred to me that the 21st Century would be dominated by widespread distortions of reality, and distribution of such a volume of plainly fake "news" reporting.
 
Sadly, I expect it to get worse the closer we get to November. Russian has its IRA up and running. That's what they used in 2016 to mess with our elections. Read the Mueller Report (remember that?) it's all there.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/06/g-s1...-deepfakes-sham-websites-social-media-ukraine

Russian propaganda is ramping up in a busy global election year, targeting American voters as well as elections in Europe and the Paris Olympics, according to intelligence officials, internet researchers and tech companies.
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https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-troll-data-russia-ira-iran/
The social network has published a series of massive datasets detailing the activity of state-sponsored trolls on its platform. This includes activity from known Russian accounts and those that are believed to have originated in Iran. In total there's information on 3,841 accounts that were linked to Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) and 700 accounts that have links to Iran.
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You know who's addicted to porn? The Pulitzer Prize jury for fiction! I just read, "Night Watch," this year's winner, and dang!
 
About half the book took place inside The Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in 1874, a real and surprisingly nice place, way ahead of it's time. I liked that part. However the writer kept flashing aback to why our protagonists were in there, and so we had to know about years of abuse and a rape scene that went on in graphic detail for about six pages. There are now some horrible things in my head I'll never get out. I do not recommend.
 
I read about that tribe on a TV programme and believed the story. I'm glad it has been uncovered as a lie about the porn.
What on earth are we to believe these days? It is all confusing.
 
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