[dang]

There are no "watchdogs on duty" or "on a payroll". Users see submissions and flag ones that they think shouldn't be on HN.

In this case your submission was, though not the identical article, exactly the same topic as another submission which was one of the most prominent stories of the day (the third most, in fact: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-21). The natural place to add additional links and make the argument that discussion shouldn't center around a single researcher, would have been as a comment in that thread. Posting a new submission about amounted to a dupe, which fragments discussion, so there's an easy good-faith interpretation for why users might have flagged it. Note that the site guidelines ask people here to "Assume good faith." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That's because the downsides of assuming bad faith are orders of magnitude worse for the site than the downsides of assuming good faith.