I'm quite used to articles like this appearing as (flagged) by the time I click the actual comments.
It would be interesting to know who is constantly flagging the articles, either users hell-bent on hn being only about tech, or right-wing people that don't want to be reminded about this.
I think communities, like ours, having this attitude is very self-destructive. We can't keep trying to operate in a silo and exclude politics from our discussions. Especially when a lot of us work on tools that exasperate these political problems.
I understand where you're coming from. At the same time, not every forum is the appropriate forum for every discussion. Some are better suited for particular topics. The experience of discussing political issues on HN is often very fraught and I think it's a very open question as to whether it ends up being constructive or destructive to the HN community as a whole. I think it's very important to be able to talk about political issues. I'm not sure HN can consistently have constructive conversations on divisive topics and remain the platform it is.
Even from a purely economical sense, if the content we're exposed to is purely the [t]echo chamber of SV concerns, we end up with startups solving SV problems which is a pretty limited market.
I'd say there is a certain amount of both kinds of flags. I don't tend to flag submissions that aren't obviously spam, but for political topics the quality of the article does need to pretty high to prevent sane discussion being drowned out by the flamewar, so I can understand when others are flagging more aggressively.
It goes both ways. For example, submissions that were critical of Google's handling or the media's reporting of the "Google memo" were flagged as well.
Part of that was sheer mass. For what, at least 2 weeks (?) there was article after article after article about it. And most articles were posted repeatedly, to the point where it was hard to tell which were posted first and which were posted later. I definitely got sick of seeing the same links over and over again..
Articles supporting Google's decision were also posted repeatedly, and flagged repeatedly. And articles criticizing the current administration are also frequently flag-killed, so it's not just right-wing coverage that gets removed.
I agree. The OP raised the point that left-leaning submissions get flagged a lot, making it seem like this is unique to that end of the spectrum. My point is that it happens to the right as well.
Ha! Sorry, you're right. The "threads" page doesn't give you any of the context of what your original message was in response to, so I forgot what I had been responding to :-)
Was on the front page for a brief moment is how I actually discovered it and the link. Gone after I finished reading it, doesn't show as 'flagged' yet but it's definitely been removed cause I can't find it in the top 5 pages.. unfortunate.
Quite interesting actually, I saw Brennan's video from that day as I'm sure everyone following the events did. Even saw some of the 'trolls and bots' on Twitter claiming it was fake and staged in the comments.
Had no idea it would spread to the point of doxxing (of his entire family?!) and fake anthrax emails. That's scary.
But great line from the article: "My parents’ sole precaution was to pick the remaining tomatoes from their garden, “so the Nazis wouldn’t get them.”
> Was on the front page for a brief moment is how I actually discovered it and the link. Gone after I finished reading it, doesn't show as 'flagged' yet but it's definitely been removed cause I can't find it in the top 5 pages.. unfortunate.
This really surprised me!
I feel like this is evidence that HN cultivates content beyond merely 'flagged'/'removed'.
I've never thought that lobste.rs "moderation log" feature was very interesting until now.
There are conspiracy theorists and assorted wackos in any sizable group of people. I'm not surprised at the threats he has received. Amazed (in a bad way) and disappointed that people like those making the threats exist. That such warped brains exist. I'm not saying they should be wiped out, just sad to realize that this state of mind is even possible.
But I'm not surprised or shocked.
Anyway, scanning through the article, where was the fake news commentary?
The image at the top of the article was extremely jarring. My immediate thought was whether anyone in the image died, and then my stomach sank with the sense that the use of this image for the topic of fake news is exploitative and disrespectful.
If anyone who read the article disagrees I would like to hear your point of view. I closed the page after only a few seconds.
I think that graphic images like this, or of terrorism, or of warfare are a necessary check for those of us who are so disconnected from these events. It does not strike me as exploitative.
Previously, I had seen video of the car driving away, reversing, and video of the aftermath. I had not yet seen this still image, it's very striking. It is clear to me that it is sheer luck that the devastation and loss of life wasn't worse than it was.
> I closed the page after only a few seconds.
If you're disturbed by the image I really recommend that you consider reading the article with your browser's auto-image-load feature disabled. I don't think there's any downside to reading the article. After you've read it, decide on the merits of what the author's written and any credentials they have whether it should be credible.
I guess the problem is my personal perspective. IMO it is very important to openly discuss horrific events, but personally I don't need to see the last couple moments of someone's life about to end in order to have that discussion.
If I'm not mistaken, the image comes from the author's own video of the murderous assault.
The post is about the author being demonized for having published it and the contrivance of conspiracy theories and threats against him and his family.
It connects these events to "fake news" by first hand experience dangers of muddying the informational waters around controversial and important issues.
What are you confused about, exactly? That's a famous photo of what actually happened at the scene. Here is a story about the photo and the photographer, Ryan Kelly,
These things happen when people, with MH issues, thinks there are different teams, like the Cowboys vs the Giants or Republicans vs Democrats. There is only one team in America, Team USA.
Down Votes from people who didn't read the article? Author's life was threatened for taking the video of the crash.
Wait how are people taking what I am saying? They didn't read the article?
He posted the video of the crash on twitter and did interviews all Sunday. The alt-right conspiracy was he was planted there to take the picture. His life was threatened. Those are the people with MH.
I sympathize with the sentiment that we should be looking for ways to work together. I suspect what people are responding to is your reference to "MH issues", which I read as mental health issues. Unless you're speaking clinically, which is difficult to see how in this case, it's name calling, which is explicitly against the forum guidelines.
When you say MH do you mean mental health? If not, please ignore the remainder of my comment. If so, I don't think so. It's just name calling, unless you're referring to specific clinical issues. I doubt you're attempting to attribute particular diagnoses here. If you don't mean specific issues, then it's so broad as to be meaningless, and that goes back to name calling.
> Murder ... by any willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing ... is murder of the first degree... . All [other murder] is murder of the second degree... .
The 2nd degree murder charge means that the killing was NOT "willful, deliberate, and premeditated."
Of course, the author is not actually saying that Fields is an accidental terrorist. The author isn't saying Fields used violence to pursue a political aim without any willful, deliberate, and premeditated intent to do so. The author is lying. The author is trying to trick readers into assuming facts which are not. That's why it's fake news.
You have distorted the meaning of this term. It was originally applied to fly-by-night online "publications" who have no background or experience in journalism making spurious claims later shown to have no backing evidence.
This is an eyewitness account of an attack (the authr does describe it as terrorism, yes) and later the response to their account and video recording. The video substantiates his account and the response is likely backed with evidence (police report regarding white powder, etc).
You dispute the author's claim that it should be called terrorism. That's pretty subtle overall IMO, and does not make the article or the publication worthy of being described as "fake news." Please choose another term, like "hyperbole" or "exaggeration".
> The 2nd degree murder charge means that the killing was NOT "willful, deliberate, and premeditated."
The choice of charge just means that the prosecution is not yet convinced that it was a planned attack, as opposed to a spontaneous decision. Additional evidence might cause them to change their mind. In any case, it does indicate that they do not regard it as an accident.
Is a Muslim man who gets enraged by a gay couple kissing and stabs them an Islamist terrorist? I have no idea, but he might very well be tied to an organized movement that encouraged his behavior, and then I'd definitely call it terrorism, even if it wasn't the result of long-term planning.
(regarding the merely second-degree murder charge)
It's still possible the driver was motivated by fear for his life - that the driver was trying to get away from protestors rather than trying to kill them. The video here even provides a little supporting evidence for that perspective - notice how ~4 seconds in, you see and hear a protestor standing to the left of where the car passes WHACKS THE REAR OF THE CAR WITH A BAT.
I'm pretty careful not to share anything remotely political so as to avoid my public profile taking on too much polarizing content.
But I'm astonished and disappointed by the capacity of some to forfeit objectivity in the name of what seems to me like a cult of personality.
EDIT: I'm happy to burn my karma to speak my mind. Downvoters, please join the debate.