
Ask HN: Recent censorship on HN? - jsingleton
I&#x27;ve noticed that a lot of stories regarding a certain US political figure (who I won&#x27;t mention here) have been silently killed recently.<p>Is this HN mods enforcing policy, a rogue agent abusing their power, an organized attempt to limit discourse (as happens in Russia) or something else entirely?<p>In any case it&#x27;s not very transparent what&#x27;s occurring. What are people&#x27;s thoughts?
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onion2k
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they 're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon._

Political discussion online pretty much always tumbles in to a flamewar. HN is
better off without it in my opinion.

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detaro
At least those in your submission history are flagkilled, -> enough users
clicked the flag link on them, as you can see from the [flagged] in the title
(if you have showdead enabled in your profile, they still appear in listings).
Not everything is a conspiracy.

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jsingleton
So I guess the question is if this is organic and these are real users or if
they are bots controlled by someone with an agenda.

BTW you don't see [flagged] on your own posts. They look normal but are simply
absent if not logged in. Similar to hell-banning.

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mtmail
It's real users. I frequent the new submissions page a lot and I would've
flagged all three submission (I wasn't online then).

My reasoning is that Drumpf is not HN material. Same with Leonardo not winning
an Oscar, Kane tweeting about his new studio album or the superbowl. Even with
school shootings and terrorist attacks only very few articles make the
frontpage.

It's not disagreement with the campaign (I enjoyed the show on youtube) or
political agenda, just trying to keep quality up. My guide is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/best](https://news.ycombinator.com/best)

[edit: on slow work day (weekend) I probably look at 75% of submissions and
flag 5 maximum. Flagging comments is very very rare. It needs several users to
flag to become active, I don't know personally or collaborate with others
users on flagging.]

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stray
Something else entirely.

HN is not reddit. US political figures are uninteresting here -- unless
they've invented a new geospatial-temporal database or something.

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seren
It could also be people flagging.

The US presidential elections certainly have a worldwide impact but not
everyone outside of US is interested by the minutia of the campaign,
especially when reading HN.

Edit : I interpreted that you were talking about Trump (or Clinton) but I
might be wrong...

