Let’s talk about false balance in sex reporting, specifically in regards to the porn debate. The way that the question ‘is porn actually damaging our brains?’ is so often presented as a roughly 50/50 argument. On one side: people like me who love porn (or people who make it) bleating sadly about the loss of our livelihoods/hobbies. On the other side: brave crusaders for truth who are opening our eyes to the dangers with their shocking stats and stories of addiction.
Except – obviously – it’s a bit more complicated than that
The porn debate
Here is an article on whether porn is destroying our brains.
“Research has consistently shown that porn actually has far more positive than negative effects and, further, that it’s only problematic for a minority of users. If the anti-porn advocates were serious about helping this minority, they’d stop pretending that porn is the boogeyman and start paying attention to the very limited circumstances under which porn can be problematic.”
Here is an infographic on whether porn is destroying our brains.
Partial infographic from Kinkly’s article
But presenting both of these side-by-side is like presenting a half-eaten apple next to a delicious fruit salad and claiming I’ve offered you a ‘balanced choice of dessert.’ Because one of these things is not like the other. In presenting them together I’ve created false balance: I’ve made it look, sneakily, like both sources are roughly equal.
False balance is a huge issue in other areas of reporting, not just in the porn debate. It comes from a good place – journalists don’t want to be led by their own biases, so when someone stands up and says ‘This is GOOD’ they often go on the hunt for someone who’ll say ‘This is BAD’. Thus the journalist can present both sides and feel like they’ve given a balanced overview. Problem is, the two sides aren’t always equal.
In the climate change ‘debate’, you have the vast majority of the world’s scientists and experts on one side and… some people who really like cars on the other. In the vaccination ‘debate’ you have an overwhelming weight of scientific evidence on one side and… a guy who has been widely discredited on the other.
False balance in sex reporting
False balance is a problem in sex reporting too, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the porn ‘debate’. When people start chucking out propaganda framed as science, we need to be careful not to get sucked in. That infographic is an incredible example. It’s a big long list of some big scary nuggets of information. Some of them are relevant but questionable. Others are irrelevant but true. My favourite ones, like the ones highlighted above, are both irrelevant and questionable and are merely there for padding – as a vague intimation that porn is a huge unstoppable force on a direct collision course with our homes.
Here are the stats from that image, alongside my attempts to fact check them:
- YouPorn is the second largest porn site (Fact check: their source for this, when I eventually found it, is an article written in 2012. Way to keep up with the fast-paced internet! From what I can tell, Youporn is actually now the largest porn site. But it doesn’t matter, because ‘one porn site more popular than others’ is not a fact that in any way contributes to us knowing whether porn is damaging people’s brains)
- It serves up 100 million views a day – one view for every 3 Americans (Fact check: any blogger could tell you that views is nebulous. Do you mean pageviews? Visits? Unique visitors? There’s no need to use this vague term, or indeed to try and ‘guess’ how many Americans might view it. Youporn is pretty open with their data. They get around 20million visitors per day, with each one looking at roughly 9-10 pages per visit. Again, though: whether this porn site is successful is completely irrelevant to the question on whether porn is destroying our brains)
- The site is responsible for 2% of the internet’s entire traffic – transferring 950tb per second (Fact check: I cannot find a decent source for this ANYWHERE save for a bit of speculation in that ExtremeTech article and an unsourced reference in a Vice article about the horrors of porn addiction. Again, though: irrelevant. Just as knowing how much internet traffic Netflix is responsible for is irrelevant in deciding whether you can get addicted to House of Cards.)
- That’s the equivalent of 475 consumer hard drives every second (Fact check: WHAT ARE YOU EVEN ON ABOUT. You can buy a 5tb hard drive off Amazon, so actually it’s only the equivalent of 190 consumer hard drives. But I have an old hard drive in my basement that’s just 50 gig. SO OH MY GOD IT’S SO MANY HARD DRIVES IF YOU LAID THEM END TO END THEY’D REACH MANCHESTER. We’re all gonna die of porn. Crushed under the weight of it stored on ‘consumer’ hard drives. Anyway: irrelevant)
That’s just four ‘facts’ from a tiny proportion of that infographic. When you dig further you discover that there are more dodgy stats, and most of them link to a site called ‘Your Brain On Porn’, which as you can imagine is pretty keen to spread the idea that porn is bad for your brain, and is also pretty keen to sell you its book for some dollars.
Compare that to Justin Lehmiller’s article in Vice, which links to reputable peer-reviewed sources for his claims, and you’ll start to see why I get a bit hacked off when these two porn debate arguments are presented alongside each other. Or – worse – when only the dodgily-sourced claims are referenced, with just a token gesture implying that these views are controversial.
It isn’t just the porn debate either. The ‘debate’ on sex robots is far-too-often dominated by the views of the ‘Campaign Against Sex Robots’ – a vaguely euphemistic name for a campaign that is predominantly fighting for the abolition of sex work. There are plenty of interesting questions we can ask about sex and robotics, but sadly in the hunt for ‘balance’ far too many journalists stumble across this campaign, and end up giving it unfair prominence purely on the basis that their spokesperson is currently the easiest go-to rent-a-quote for a ‘sex robots are bad’ opinion.
There are always two sides!
When Kinkly put the infographic up, they framed it like this:
“There are strong arguments on both sides of the pornography debate.”
I should point out that since then, Kinkly have accepted that it wasn’t great to present the infographic this way, so yay for them listening and responding to criticism in a way that many others don’t. But Kinkly aren’t the only ones who’ve been sucked in by the desire to stay balanced, and ended up presenting appalling arguments on an equal footing with good ones.
Even writing this here I’ve been sneaky, because I have skin in this game too: I am biased. I’m more inclined to agree with Lehmiller, and therefore less inclined to go dig into his stats looking to find a flaw or a problem. What’s more, I picked the stats from that infographic that were my faves – i.e. the most patently ridiculous and irrelevant – because it was far more fun to rip on those than on the more boring ones (like the self-referring ‘surveys’ done on guys who’d already convinced themselves porn was damaging, which asked them whether they thought porn might be damaging). At the same time, though, I’m confident enough in Lehmiller’s sources that I’ll post the link to his piece again here: go and see for yourself.
In the meantime be wary of false balance. Be wary of things framed as ‘debate’ when they’re anything but.
7 Comments
Yeah, ‘false balance’ is a definite problem with the media – particularly with those that are *trying* to be impartial and unbiased, like the BBC. But for any journalist reporting on a disputed issue, there’s a lazy temptation to reduce it to a ‘he said’/’she said’ opposition and not bother trying to assess which ‘side’ has the weight of more evidence and expertise behind them (or avoiding the adversarial approach altogether). Decorum holds me back from going into particular examples…
As for the Kinkly infographic, I don’t think it was awful, but the problem with it was that it was mostly based on the reported porn habits of a self-selecting online community of people who feel they’re wanking too much and having problems with porn use. I don’t doubt the genuineness of their responses, but they can’t be taken as representative of porn users in general; it would be like trying to generalise about the effects of alcohol on people from a survey of Alcoholics Anonymous members. By definition, people who have a problem with X will tell you that X is a problem.
This is a different kind of bias: presenting a selective sample as representative of a much larger group. The average porn user would have a very different experience from the ‘nofap’ people, and in fact the Vice article suggests that for most people, porn plays a positive or neutral role in their lives more than a negative one. The articles don’t contradict each other, they’re just looking at different things.
Hmm. I see what you mean, and on reflection my post is ridiculously muddled. Basically: I see these presented as ‘opposing’ sides all the time, and my frustration with the Kinkly article was the way it presented the infographic as ‘here’s one of the sides – obviously others disagree’ without really examining what the graphic was actually saying and whether it was worth putting up at all (imho: it wasn’t – and for the reasons you mention as well as the bits above).
Here’s a quote from the intro to their piece:
“Anti-pornography activists argue that pornography degrades women; that it turns us on to increasingly graphic and extreme forms of sex; that it affects our sex lives by influencing our perceptions of sex; that it is designed to become addictive. Those on the other side of the debate say that pornography is a form of sexual expression, that expressing ourselves sexually is a natural form of being human and that studies haven’t proved that pornography – even hardcore pornography – has any ill effects.”
But yeah, you’re right about sample bias – and I did mention that too, albeit as a bit of an afterthought. There’s quite a lot to pick apart in the way the whole NoFap movement evangelises though. There are also threads of ‘I did this for my sex life and I felt like it was good therefore everyone should do the same thing I do’, which is annoying. If someone wants to not watch porn, I’m not going to come round their house and stick ‘Anal gangbang 4’ on the telly, but I am going to get really annoyed if they extrapolate from their individual experience to tell everyone that porn must therefore be The Worst Thing.
A pal of mine pointed out yesterday too that using the ‘vast amounts of data’ points isn’t particularly helpful for the anti-porn lobby: if they highlight just how much porn is out there, and how often people watch, then the fact that relatively few people actually have problems with porn surely hurts their argument. If it were inevitable that porn would turn us into horn-zombies, there’d surely be more horn-zombies wandering around Tesco and suchlike.
The root cause of the imbalance is generally confirmation bias: I have a theory, I shall collect data to prove it is true. This bias is an inherent part of human nature, reinforced by editorial guidelines, recruitment policy and political agendas.
All anyone can do is keep an open mind, challenge “facts” that are presented without source and read more than one news source every day.
Just as a clarification for one of your fact-checks: YouPorn, along with RedTube, Thumbzilla, xHamster and many others, are all now part of the Pornhub network. It doesn’t actually matter, essentially, which porn tube site one takes for one’s infographic, because effectively everything should route back to PornHub.
As far as I can see, all the sites on Pornhub are very similar (with some of the same scenes if you’re looking for them), and the different sites are now just multiple places to host the scenes.
Yep, I know – it’s part of MindGeek which actually owns… almost everything by way of big porn sites (although not Xhamster – that’s one of very few big ones that aren’t owned by MindGeek). Shameless plug – I interviewed Stoya recently and she’s fascinating on this topic, suggesting that if it were any other industry than porn there’d be big antitrust investigations into it. But because it’s porn… well. There’s a big list on their Wiki page of all the sites and orgs they own – it’s pretty eye-opening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek
Thank you for this article. I took a creative writing seminar in high school that had a strong journalism component. Our teacher would really push the “there are two sides to every story” shtick. I wrote an article about Holocaust denial that I hoped to get published in our school newspaper. My teacher flat-out told me that I was biased because I didn’t include enough quotes by prominent Holocaust deniers. She said journalists should aim to be fair and balanced in their reporting and told me to include more perspective from “the other side”. Instead of arguing with her or risking a bad grade, I chose another topic for the assignment. I just couldn’t tolerate treating genocide as if it’s up for debate.
I think in life it’s always good to look at something from different perspectives – imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes.
But in journalism, I think providing two sides of a story doesn’t need to go as far as balancing a story, but it should aim to be unbiased, and in that case looking at both sides of an argument is needed. If we’re talking about how porn can be damaging, the author might want to present the arguments why it is damaging, then note that this only affects a certain amount of people.
It’s kind of like when giving evidence in court you’re asked to tell the whole truth then only given time to answer yes or no, without explaining the circumstances. Facts without context can easily weigh an argument in a certain direction.
Also, slightly off topic but, reading about MindGeek, I saw they have a stake in promoting conversations about porn. I guess they’re pretty happy with the conversation boom in “Porn is bad” vs “It’s not that bad”