
CNN accidentally broadcast 30 minutes of hardcore porn last night - nebula
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2016/11/25/cnn-hardcore-porn/
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makomk
Although this is hilarious, it seems to be sourced to a single Twitter user. I
wonder if it's actually true or just another example of fake news making it
onto real news sites?

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I think it's probably right that this is bullshit.

30 minutes of hardcore porn on CNN at 11PM on Thanksgiving on a popular cable
network in Boston is an eternity. The idea that only one person saw it and
reported it is absurd.

Edit, To wit: [http://www.mediaite.com/online/did-the-media-fall-for-a-
fake...](http://www.mediaite.com/online/did-the-media-fall-for-a-fake-story-
about-cnn-airing-30-minutes-of-hardcore-porn-last-night/)

~~~
ghurtado
Absolutely:

> ...pixelates the naughty parts while leaving the TiVo lower third graphic
> untouched.

That was the sentence that locked in the "bullshit alert signal" for me.

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woliveirajr
> (...) after a grave error by RCN, a local cable TV provider based in New
> Jersey that provides CNN's broadcasting all down the east coast.

> Apparently, only viewers in Boston experienced the mistake on Thursday night
> as one viewer voiced her concerns on Twitter.

According to these lines from [1], it was a localized problem, and wasn't from
the CNN stream, but from the RCN replaying a wrong feed to subscribers.

[1] [http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/tv/news/cnn-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/tv/news/cnn-accidentally-airs-30-minutes-of-non-stop-hardcore-
porn-a7439371.html)

~~~
djsumdog
I wonder if someone found and exploit on their network and did this for kicks,
or maybe a disgruntled employee with enough access left in a time bomb before
he or she was let go.

~~~
ranman
I think it is more likely that "parts unknown" was part of a porn title.

~~~
codedokode
Why would they have a porn in the studio?

~~~
smsm42
Some providers have PPV or subscription adult channels.

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swang
the person whose tweet is in the news article had to protect her* tweet
because people were sending her hate mail.

what the hell.

~~~
anigbrowl
Left to themselves,a significant number of people are awful. You know, between
natural language processing, sentiment analysis, clustering and so on, IDing
things like hateful tweets or persistently hateful tweeters seems well within
the capability of today's AI. Nor do I think it would be too hard to find
funding or a revenue stream for a reliable Asshole Detector. I mean, companies
don't want to hire assholes, and browsing the news would be so much more
pleasant if comments from assholes were pre-emptively labeled as such.

~~~
djsumdog
Twitter does censor stuff, and that's not a good thing. I mean no, you
shouldn't be a bully/asshole/send death treats and that's a horrible thing to
do; but the censoring and removing posts of people you don't like starts to
create an echo chamber. People with non-hateful grievances can have their
posts swept up in the same net.

When people are anonymous, they tend to be more candid about what's really
deep down inside. The solution isn't to create A.I.s to censor everything. The
tweets are a symptom of frustration in society. The real problem is much more
difficult to fix.

~~~
drdeca
Well, surely you don't mean that the people receiving the bad messages should
have to read them, because of course you agree that they don't have to look at
twitter at all. But, why would it be important to require them to see these in
order to see other posts on twitter, if they only want to see the other ones.

So, I don't see what the problem would be in providing the users with an opt-
in filter option. If they are concerned that it could put them in a filter
bubble, they could just not enable it, and if they are not concerned about the
possibility of a filter bubble, and find the bad messages unpleasant, they
could enable it. This would all just be following user choice.

Yes, if the features you give people for filtering messages are set up in
certain ways, they may make it a bit easier than would be best for users to
create filter bubbles for themselves, but it would at least be the user's own
choice. As long as someone who wants to not get in a filter bubble can
reasonably avoid it, then it seems like that's good enough on that front to
me.

edit: Ideally, I think, the user would be able to fine tune the filters that
they choose to use, and the simplest options would be such that they do not
cause much of a filter bubble. But I think to really respect user freedom,
allowing the user to create a filter bubble for themself (perhaps using 3rd
party tools) is maybe necessary?

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sunnyP
I can see how Parts Unknown can be confused for a porn title.

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ScottBurson
Surprised no one has mentioned that this could have been a TiVo problem --
either an error in their programming data, or, more likely considering that
only one user seems to have reported it, a malfunction in an individual TiVo
unit. I've had a TiVo for years, and they do screw up or crash occasionally.

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zoul
As far as decency goes, I think that’s a reasonable improvement over the
recent presidential election coverage.

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clishem
What was broadcasted exactly?

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ChoGGi
"replaced with explicit material starring transsexual pornstar Riley Quinn"

[http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/tv/news/cnn-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/tv/news/cnn-accidentally-airs-30-minutes-of-non-stop-hardcore-
porn-a7439371.html)

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Dowwie
Hacker news needs to enable downvoting for articles. Fake news is here to
stay.

~~~
grzm
HN has submission flagging. How would submission down votes serve a useful
purpose?

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james_pm
Add TNW to the fake news list. They got it all wrong in their rush to publish.

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ry4n413
"It remains to be seen if in response to its collapsing ratings, CNN will
refocus from waging war on "fake media", and make airing of hard core porn
during primetime TV a part of scheduled programming. Come, pardon the pun, to
think of it, "Deep Quote with Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper" is a "news"
show we could certainly sink our teeth into." ZH

~~~
bitwize
This sounds like something from Idiocracy, in which Starbucks had pivoted into
the brothel-chain business.

