As to why it was flagged, the submission has no direct tech link, and while it's politically relevant and of interest to some, it wouldn't surprise me that some users have flagged it, seeing it unlikely to produce a constructive discussion while producing a lot of flames and uncivil behavior.
As to why some posts are flagged, and some to the point of '[flagged][dead]', from as much as I've witnessed it's not all that dissimilar to why some posts or comments get up-voted and others not. Certain occurrences of flagging will catch our eye based on our own perspectives.
I haven't been convinced strongly enough that there's anything nefarious afoot to warrant diving into looking at the post statistics (though I do think it would be interesting to do so). From your initial comment I might assume that you think this might be the case. If so, I encourage you to do such a study yourself. The HN APIs will likely give you enough data to provide enough data to dig into it.
As to why some posts are flagged, and some to the point of '[flagged][dead]', from as much as I've witnessed it's not all that dissimilar to why some posts or comments get up-voted and others not. Certain occurrences of flagging will catch our eye based on our own perspectives.
I haven't been convinced strongly enough that there's anything nefarious afoot to warrant diving into looking at the post statistics (though I do think it would be interesting to do so). From your initial comment I might assume that you think this might be the case. If so, I encourage you to do such a study yourself. The HN APIs will likely give you enough data to provide enough data to dig into it.
- https://github.com/HackerNews/API
- https://hn.algolia.com/api