LOS ANGELES — Last week, Mike Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) helped to debunk an oft-quoted and stigmatizing statement by anti-porn activists about the life expectancy of adult performers, which is being spread worldwide as disinformation by the Google search engine.
“If there's an issue with Google serving bad porn searches, it's things like this,” Stabile tweeted Thursday. “I was fact-checking a claim I heard, and found this snippet. So, I clicked...”
Stabile, who serves as FSC’s Director of Communications, then shared a screencap from Google’s question search that answered, with supposed authority, that “the life expectancy of a porn star” is “37.43 years.”
Google accompanied this disinformation with a snippet that claimed, “When the death ages of these porn stars were averaged it was discovered that the average life expectancy of a porn star is only 37.43 years whereas the average life expectancy of an American is 78.1 years."
Stabile’s tweet prompted a reply by Danny Sullivan, Google’s Public Liaison for Search.
"It looks like that featured snippet is pointing at a page with a critical examination of those stats that I gather have circulated in the past," Sullivan said. "That's probably helpful; [but] highlighting the particular figure, not really. Passing this on for review.”
Vice’s Samantha Cole published today an in-depth dive into the bogus claim, which unsurprisingly led to propaganda by religiously motivated anti-porn crusaders.
“Google is pulling this answer from a StackExchange thread asking the question, ‘Is the average life expectancy of a pornographic actor significantly lower than the rest of the population?’” Cole wrote. “That StackExchange threat is attempting to fact-check a ‘report’ from Reverend Daniel Jennings, who thought he was really doing something by making a chart of 129 porn performers alongside their stage names, legal names, causes of death and ages at the time they died. “
"'Becoming involved with pornography will bring God’s judgment upon you," Jennings wrote beneath the chart, Cole reported. "'Learn from the mistake of these men and women and do not allow their fate to become yours.'"
To read Samantha Cole’s “Google Is Serving Bad Statistics About Adult Performers' Life Expectancy,” visit Vice.com.