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by jungletime 2051 days ago
I just posted a link to latest Trump tweet, and got flagged. Don't understand why simply reporting something as relevant as what Trump tweeted is reason enough to get flagged. when its directly relevant to this article, and what your president tweeted is news worthy. When your president retweets that 2.7 million votes where deleted during this election by dominion software. I think thats pretty relevant to this article. Shocking as that is. I made no claims of its validity. Just simply the source.
2 comments

Nothing from that twitter account is relevant on a site dedicated to increasing knowledge, as HN is.
> I just posted a link to latest Trump tweet, and got flagged.

The tweet you was about an item of political controversy excessively well-covered in the mainstream media (making it generally off-topic even as an independent story for HN), and was not at all germane to the post about Benford's law that it was offered as a comment on (making it off-topic as a comment on that post.)

There are venues in which linking that tweet might be appropriate, one can even imagine a hypothetical HN comment thread on which it might be on-topic. However, it wasn't on-topic where it was offered.

> Don't understand why simply reporting something as relevant as what Trump tweeted is reason enough to get flagged. when its directly relevant to this article

Trump's tweets -- well, this Trump tweet, I suppose its theoretically possibly he might sometime tweet something where this would not be true -- are completely irrelevant to the utility of Benford's law in detecting voting fraud.

> and what your president tweeted is news worthy

Conventional newsworthiness (because we have a conventional newsmedia) is generally tangential and often a negative to HN-relevance.

> When your president retweets that 2.7 million votes where deleted during this election by dominion software.

Were this a thread about Dominion software, or about the general incidence of electoral fraud, or about this particular election at all, there might be an argument that that was relevant. Its not, and its not.

> I made no claims of its validity

Even if the tweet were otherwise relevant, its validity, whether or not you make an explicit representation about it, is not irrelevant to the question of whether it should be upvoted, downvoted, flagged, or simply left unmoderated when presented here.

You claim is that its off topic. But how can it be off topic when Trumps tweet is about election fraud, and the title of post is also about election fraud. Both dominion and Branford's law use statistical results for proof where the overlap happens.

This standard doesn't really get held up in other discussions on here, people mention tangentially relevant things on here all the time.