September 26, 2003

N2H2 "State Secrets" - PR and lying with statistics [part 1 addendum]

I've been searching over the web today to see if anyone, anywhere, has pointed out that the N2H2 story about porn having "1,800 Percent Increase from 14 Million Pages in 1998" is pure hype, since the web itself has grown so much in that time. The only place I've been able to find such intelligence is in a reaction news quote with ... drumroll ... Irene Graham, who is the Executive Director of Electronic Frontiers Australia (and notably one of the earliest civil-libertarians to have listened to me about censorware years ago):

IRENE GRAHAM: Of course, about five years ago there were fast less people on the Internet around the world.

Everything else I've seen has been utterly uncritical. This matters in ways both obvious (e.g. pushing censorware) and profound (what it says about my ability to fight a smear).

By Seth Finkelstein | posted in censorware | on September 26, 2003 10:15 PM (Infothought permalink) | Followups
Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)

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