the meta

When the Drudge Report slaps up a link to an article, it often words its link misleadingly. Case in point:

'From the Drudge Report to beheading videos, censorship is being successfully circumvented around the globe'...

Sounds like a link to an optimistic article about how technology allows free exchange of information even in the most repressive environments, right?

Then you start reading the article and see this fairly early on:

However, around the world, people have also discovered that, despite the abstractions of network architecture and the nostrums of boosters who predicted a "new economy" free of material constraints, the internet is also a physical thing, which has its existence on real telephone lines, internet service provider (ISP) routers, undersea fibre-optic lines and hard drives humming under tangible desks. And it's used by people sitting in real offices with real doors that can be broken down by all-too-real police if the information they're sharing contravenes local laws - and in some cases even if they don't, but some foreign power strong-arms their government, as happened in Sweden in May 2006, when US diplomats incited a police raid on an ISP hosting a popular file-sharing service called the Pirate Bay. The internet's ability to route round censorship has the character of an ideal rather than a reality, a theoretical property.

SURPRISE, motherfucker! And that's a steel-toed kick in the cojones for you! Ha ha!

If I were to slap up a Drudge link that actually represented the sentiment reflected in the article, it would have been this:

Google's oft-quoted motto is "Don't be evil", which might have sounded cool in a Stanford coffee bar, but has lately become something of an international sick joke.

Not only is the above consistent with the article's sober take on the Internet, it's also making a point about the colossal irony that Google-- itself a rather scary corporate entity-- has become.

So be careful when reading your Droog-- uh, Drudge. Quite often, you'll encounter links designed to mislead.

(By the way, that Guardian article is fascinating in its own right because of what it has to say about censorship and Western tech corporations' collusion in it.)


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