A Lazy Press Falsely Claims Musk’s Starlink Left Amazon Tribes Addicted To Porn

Like so many of Elon Musk’s accomplishments, the importance of his Starlink low-Earth orbit efforts is quite often overstated.

While a great option for those in remote locations who can actually afford the steep price tag (affordability often tops access as the top barrier to broadband adoption), the network has struggled with speed issues due to satellite physics and network congestion.

Like Tesla Solar, Starlink customer service is also a mess that’s also struggled to scale. The company has tried to unethically game taxpayer subsidy programs. There’s that whole undermining scientific research through light pollution thing. And recently, research has shown the sheer volume of Starlink satellites burning up in Earth re-orbit could prevent the Ozone layer from healing.

So while Starlink is useful, there are a few innovation asterisks that often don’t get mentioned in gushing coverage, as is often the case for so much of what Elon Musk’s companies are engaged in.

Often Starlink is portrayed as something akin to magic, such was the case in this New York Times article that claimed that life among Amazon tribes has been utterly and completely transformed by the arrival of the tech. The Times goes on at length to insist these territories are only just now coming violently face to face with all the challenges posed by social media and porn thanks to Starlink:

“After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.

Modern society has dealt with these issues over decades as the internet continued its relentless march. The Marubo and other Indigenous tribes, who have resisted modernity for generations, are now confronting the internet’s potential and peril all at once, while debating what it will mean for their identity and culture.”

But as 404 Media’s Jason Koebler deftly notes in detail, most of these challenges aren’t new to these tribes, broadband access has been in many of these territories for a while, and Starlink isn’t some utterly transformative magic bauble falling from the sky:

“What the Times did not stress and should have stressed is that what the Marubo people are experiencing now is a difference of degree and scale, not of kind. They are also not wholly new problems to the tribe. What I have learned over the years is that there are very few parts of the world that are not touched by technology, and that many Amazonian tribes, in particular, have made the choice to intentionally interact with non-Indigenous society (or have felt, at times, that they have to interact with the non-Indigenous world and technology) in order to represent and advocate for themselves in political systems that seek to seize or exploit their land or otherwise marginalize them. They also use these technologies for the same reasons everyone else does, have for years, and have been grappling with what it might mean for their culture all this time.”

But our highly aggregated (and now increasingly badly “AI” automated) engagement chasing modern news environment quickly glommed onto the porn reference, resulting in an endless flood of clickbait stating some variation of the claim of “Amazon Tribes now addicted to porn thanks to Starlink.” It all got so noisy, the Times was forced to write a follow up article clarifying things:

“These claims are unfounded, untrue and reflect a prejudiced ideological current that disrespects our autonomy and identity,” Enoque Marubo, the Marubo leader who brought Starlink to his tribe’s villages, said in a video posted online Sunday night.”

While the NYT does over-state Starlink’s importance without noting any of its caveats (which again is very common when it comes to Musk and usually works in his favor), the bigger problem was caused by an aggregated automated engagement press that misrepresented the original reporting. Of course Musk himself didn’t quite get that, and directed all of his ire exclusively at the New York Times.

It’s part of a broader cycle where Musk — a guy’s whose entirely super-genius engineer mythology was propped up by sloppy access journalism for decades — pretends that major outlets like the NYT are somehow just out to get him. Ignorant of the fact that Musk’s entire mythos wouldn’t exist if this same engagement-chasing press didn’t routinely over-state the man’s achievements and importance and completely ignore numerous problematic caveats.