Given what I know of the site, it's absolutely appropriate for it to be autokilled. (It's a pretty well-known right-wing conspiracy-theory site.) If the subject of the article is significant, there will be better articles about it on other sites which you can submit instead.
This is essentially an argumentum ad hominem. It is an irrational position to take. Arguments should be judged on their merits, not who's mouth they came from. I'm quite disappointed to learn that HN is censored in this way. I had no idea.
Does anyone know of less draconian social news sites which still try to maintain a high quality discussion?
I don't have an answer to your question. A subreddit with quality moderation could be an answer, but the readership is probably going to be much lower, to the point that it isn't useful.
I am probably more turned off by anything coming from Techcrunch, for intance, than anything related to Alex Jones (for whom I have my own reservations, to say the least). But I tolerate it. Anything that I find to be truly inappropriate, I flag.
In this case, why free press exists at all? Government could come up and say: "it's absolutely appropriate for us to ban all press as they are known of twisting words and create conspiracy theories. If the issue as stake is significant, we as the Government will post appropriate information instead."
This is not China. I think you should have a freedom of posting from wherever you feel like, as every site will have their own POV on the case. Saying that if the issue is significant, you will hear it from other place, you would have never heard about Lewinsky scandal which was brought to daylight by Drudge where no-other newspaper had published it beforehand.
I will leave my opinion about the site to myself, as it would not bring any value to this conversation.
The press is free, and so is Hacker News: in this case free not to syndicate fringe political stuff the majority of its members detest. It's not necessarily even bias: the submission guidelines are pretty clear on the site being about startups and "anything that gratifes ones intellectual curiosity" and not about current affairs.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "every site will have their own POV on the case". If you want to read the POV of people who think Sandy Hook was a government conspiracy or the POV of antivaccine fraudsters on Obama's "Psychiatric Police State" and "Nazi healthcare system", you can probably go to Prison Planet and find it syndicated there.
If you personally own the press, you can publish almost anything you like (in the United States and other free countries). The Hacker News siteowner owns Hacker News, and part of supporting freedom of the press is letting the person who pays the server bills for Hacker News decide what gets posted on Hacker News.
From: Audrey To: Joe Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2012 5:56 PM Subject: Re: dead account
Hi Joe,
That post was killed because it came from prisonplanet.com, which has been the source of too many inappropriate or off-topic stories in the past.
Cheers,
Audrey
2012/12/27 Joe
my article was killed. why? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974986