That was exactly how I learned what goatse was. My MySpace page was all decked out with images that I was hotlinking from some server... The server owner realized this and replaced all the images with Goatse. One day a friend goes "Hey... uh, what's up with your MySpace page... that's pretty gross". So I went to log in: Goastse. Goastse everywhere (gestures with hand). And my eyes were never the same again ಠ_ಠ
That was popular in the early ebay days when you had to host your own images. A friend had someone selling similar items using his image links. So he changed the images to goatse. Problem solved.
It wasn't only CNN. A bunch of big news sites linked directly to the image hosted at tribalwar. It all started with some news video of one of the WTC towers smoking. Someone on the forum screenshoted the video and asked "what is this?" because the smoke produced this weird devil-like formation. That picture goes spread around and soon news sites started writing stories saying that triablwar had photoshopped the image and that they were evil and making fun of a tragedy blah blah blah. So basically the news sites were DDOSing tribalwar and lying about them to make them look bad in their sensationalist articles. The administrators of the forums send many emails begging them to stop directly linking to the site and it only got worse and worse. Finally they replaced the image with goatse (with text overplayed giving the true story). If I remember correctly the image was viewed by hundreds of thousands or maybe more people before they were totally removed. That was how tribalwar goatsed the internet. It really was quite legendary.
Because it is one of the things that will get you added to the blocklists that form part of the Great Firewall of China.
It won't stop a hacker who is probably bypassing parts of that anyway, but the more casual requests such as those caused by deep linking will generally stop getting through.