Yeah they made the classic mistake of writing an article using the kind of manipulative rhetoric that typically works on 100 IQ people, and then sharing it with Hacker News.
The first example provided explains the situation exactly - a link that google shows as going to gimp.org in fact takes the user to scam.com (or whatever). Is the "manipulative rhetoric" you're referring to an expectation that a reader actually read the article?
Are you referring to one of the many twitter links? I didn’t see that in the article itself.