[gavinray]

Here is the post that has vanished:

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=29684814

  > I don’t think any political entity has any interest in controlling what individuals post on a tiny website like HN.

I wish I could pull a cached view of the comment up (I tried), there wasn't anything I would interpret as being inflammatory in there.

The comment boiled down to:

  "VICE isn't what I'd call the most reputable/unbiased source. I'd encourage everyone to do their own research/make their own decision. Here are a bunch of links of people walking around the same area, and it looks nothing like what is cut together from that VICE episode."

The speed at which it was flagged and removed was shocking. Like I said, (maybe I am a bad person for this), I don't really care that much about China or politics in general. There are a lot of other things I'd rather spend my energy caring about, that directly impact me.

I just wanted to call out this very odd behavior. I don't see HN as a place where people who speak objectively + respectfully get silenced, generally.

[andrewxdiamond]

As for the flagging, I believe HN auto-flags comments from new accounts that receive a large number of downvotes as an anti-spam feature.

[andrewxdiamond]

If you enable showdead on your profile, you’ll see that this comment is denying the well documented genocide that is occurring in these regions. That will rightfully annoy many people here, hence the downvotes.

So using the razor, I think we can conclude what happened.

User makes a new throwaway account to spread easily disproved information

Other users downvote the misinformation

HN autoflags the comment to protect against preceived-spam.

Although you are right to question what you see. It is never wrong to take a second to ask “what’s going on here?”

[monort]

Enable showdead in settings to view flagged comments.

[themitigating]

There are other rules that are unrelated to being objective or respectful