News portals and dodgy thumbnails

[chevalier]

My brain may be overheating, but I can’t get my mind off something I’d easily have dismissed even a year ago. Basically, while reading the news online, I saw one of those idiotic raunchy clip thumbnails - I scrolled up like always (don’t need to see it), but then the title struck me as so infantile and ludicrous that I rolled my eyes and scrolled down to see what they came up with. Then I decided nah, it was porn anyway so not worth looking at, so I shut the window before I even had a chance to look at the thumbnail and description (yes, they put something like that on a normal news site). Technically, for a second I accepted that I’d see the thumbnail - though I didn’t want any sexual gratification, I was just interested what kind of idiocy the title referred to. If it were someone else’s problem I wouldn’t think of it for a second, but for some reason my mind isn’t allowing me any peace over it because I technically, for a second or less, accepted that I would see that smut (regardless of intent, which in my case translated to “Lol, what? rolleyes”). How do you deal with such things?

 

[Rand_Al_Thor]

If you weren’t looking at it for the purposes of lusting or recieving any gratification, and only for laughing at what it was about, it doesn’t sound sinful to me. However, it could be a temptation and place you in a near occasion of sin, so I think that your course of action was wise to close the window and not look.

In Christ,
Rand

 

[Michael_Mary]

The internet is a wonderful resource of information and communication. It is also fraught with great danger.

One time I was looking for some nice images of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

I used that exact 3 word title, for my search. I could not believe the amount of pornographic material it brought it.

We must simply do what you did - drop anything that is corrupt - and go on with life.

Even television advertisements have horrible images in them.

This world is full of such filth - and we must go on, doing the best we can, avoiding the traps and pitfalls, invoking St. Michael the Archangel’s and the Blessed Mother’s help and intercessions at every turn.

 

[Dale_M]

.
One time I was looking for some nice images of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

I used that exact 3 word title, for my search. I could not believe the amount of pornographic material it brought it.
.

You may want to consider putting such a search in quotation marks. It would look like this:
“Blessed Virgin Mary”

The advantage of using quotation marks is that it tells the search engine to retrieve only the sites which uses all three words, one after another, and in the order you listed them.

I just did this with Google and the first five pages of results (which is as far as I looked) all appear to be clean.

But yes, similar to the OP I have found some borderline pornographic advertising on some news sites. Not mainstream ones such as Yahoo or Google, but on the more independent operations (which may be more cash-starved).

 

[NewUlm1976_2000]

My brain may be overheating, but I can’t get my mind off something I’d easily have dismissed even a year ago. Basically, while reading the news online, I saw one of those idiotic raunchy clip thumbnails - I scrolled up like always (don’t need to see it), but then the title struck me as so infantile and ludicrous that I rolled my eyes and scrolled down to see what they came up with. Then I decided nah, it was porn anyway so not worth looking at, so I shut the window before I even had a chance to look at the thumbnail and description (yes, they put something like that on a normal news site). Technically, for a second I accepted that I’d see the thumbnail - though I didn’t want any sexual gratification, I was just interested what kind of idiocy the title referred to. If it were someone else’s problem I wouldn’t think of it for a second, but for some reason my mind isn’t allowing me any peace over it because I technically, for a second or less, accepted that I would see that smut (regardless of intent, which in my case translated to “Lol, what? rolleyes”). How do you deal with such things?

Use the Firefox web browser with the AdBlock extension. Select that image and choose to block it (note you can use a * wildcard to block all from that server). Poof, no more ads.

 

[chevalier]

Wasn’t ads. And I have them blocked. News portals just throw such stuff in for entertainment because people think it’s cool. I decided to go to confession and yeah, I found I shouldn’t have checked it out even for a laugh - my policy is normally to ignore and boycott the smut, I don’t even need to read real and informative news if it comes with smut pictures for the lure (and that lure doesn’t work on me anyway - I’m turned off if anything, by how vulgar those pictures can be). Only later it occured to me I hadn’t actually even looked “properly” at it since I saw that thing by accident later when checking my mailbox (it was the portal running one of my mailboxes), sigh. The confession took a lot of time for other reasons too, I also got some advice on this one, and it turned out I didn’t wind up in that church by accident (long story). So, all in all, a happy ending. Must be consistent with the principles and worry less, I guess. The hairsplitting is killing me sometimes, but I can’t say I’d rather go by feelings instead.