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An Indigenous tribe in the Amazon rainforest is suing the New York Times (NYT) over a story they say made it look like their young people were addicted to porn.
The Marubo tribe in Brazil, which has about 2,000 members, says the NYT report made them look like they couldn’t handle having the internet. They are asking for at least $180 million in damages.
The lawsuit also names TMZ and Yahoo as defendants, alleging that their stories amplified and sensationalized the Times’s reporting and smeared the tribe in the process.
The story was published nine months after the tribe got Starlink, a satellite internet service from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The article said that just like American families, the Marubo were now dealing with things like teens stuck on their phones, violent video games, and some watching pornography. It said a community leader was most worried about the porn, and had heard about some young men acting more aggressively.
Even though the article also talked about internet benefits—like calling for medical help or reporting environmental damage—the tribe says it still created a harmful image.
Other media outlets, like TMZ and Yahoo, picked up the story and made it worse, according to the lawsuit. TMZ ran a headline about porn addiction and used a video showing the internet being set up, which made it look like the people involved were responsible for spreading porn.
The NYT later published another story saying, “No, A Remote Amazon Tribe Did Not Get Addicted to Porn.” It said that over 100 websites had wrongly reported that the tribe was hooked on porn. But the tribe argues that the NYT’s original article caused the damage in the first place.
“The Marubo people are not addicted to pornography,” Nicas wrote in the second story. “There was no hint of this in the forest, and there was no suggestion of it in The New York Times’s article.”
That did not satisfy the tribe, which says in the lawsuit that the story “failed to acknowledge the role the NYT itself played in fueling the defamatory narrative. Rather than issuing a retraction or apology, the follow-up downplayed the original article’s emphasis on pornography by shifting blame to third-party aggregators.”
Nicas wrote that he spent a week with the Marubo tribe. The lawsuit says that while he was invited for a week, he spent less than 48 hours in the village, “barely enough time to observe, understand, or respectfully engage with the community”.
The lawsuit was first reported by Courthouse News.
The lawsuit was filed by Enoque Marubo, a local leader, and Flora Dutra, a Brazilian activist who helped bring internet access to the tribe. They say the stories have brought them shame, threats, and lasting harm.
The NYT says the original article was fair and thoughtful and says it will fight the lawsuit.
Source: BBC, Guardian.
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