“Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption…”
‘Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,’ Edelman says.”
Conservatives and religious people consuming more porn than others? That would make them hypocrites! Let’s see how they arrive at this conclusion.
“Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer’s postal code.”
Great, we can see the number of porn subscriptions in a given zip code. While this may be interesting, it does nothing to link porn subscriptions to religious beliefs and/or activity or political leanings. It may be that the liberal elements of the zip code are the ones purchasing the porn.
“The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users”
Again, the problem with this result is that it does nothing to link behavior to an actual person. All we know is that in towns that vote conservative and have religious beliefs, more porn is purchased than in other towns.
The article goes on to quote other statistics at the state level that fail to link porn use to individual religious and political beliefs.
In other words, this data tells us everything except the conclusion the study’s authors have drawn.
It would be more useful if they reported results at the zip code level and linked that to voting districts. At least then, we would have a closer link to an individual than an entire state.
I thought scientists were unbiased and believed in the integrity of their research. Who’s the hypocrite again?
I love it when smart people (like you) show how statistics are manipulated to perpetuate lies. I worked at a pizza place, where the owner, a not religious fellow, made a HUGE deal about how much porn he owned, how he let his little boy sit and watch it with him. High quality fellow. It might be that non-religious people in Utah use porn to further distance themselves from the religious. Also, could be that Utah has a lot of repression and hypocrisy. Dirty filthy internet.
@MBR: Thanks! Given that 99% of our conference talks with President Hinckley included some message about not watching porn, I think you’re right that there’s some members of the Church watching it. What bothers me is how disingenuous these “news” organizations are with their stats.
By the way, congrats on your interview. I read it the other day and it was great!!