Peering intently at their battered Chinese mobile phones, members of a tiny indigenous community deep in the Amazon slowly cluster in the overgrown grass near the Wi-Fi signal.

It’s 7am and the village internet, powered by solar panels, has just been switched on. It is time for the locals, most of whom still speak their ancestral Matsigenka language, to catch up on the news, greet relatives in other communities scattered across Peru’s endless jungles, and doom scroll.

The connection, provided via US satellite firm HughesNet, would be painfully slow, around one megabit per second even for a single user. But somehow, the dozen or so villagers make it work.

The chief, Virginia Silva, 33, is browsing through her video feed on Facebook, by far the dominant app here. Quickly, she flicks through Shrek, Angry Birds and Grinch memes and then lands on a clip of a blindfolded, overweight woman flailing off the roof of a pickup truck into a river.

Eventually, Ms Silva lands on some content that truly interests her, watching it over and over again – an advert for a chainsaw. “There’s a one-year guarantee,” the presenter says jauntily. “Remember, it’s Japanese technology!”