[dang]

HN's standard about this question has been stable for many years: some stories with political overlap are both inevitable and in keeping with the mandate of the site. The question, when it comes to the biggest political topics, is which stories clear that bar.

I've posted about this many times, including quite a few explanations specific to the current topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435324 (Feb 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024 (Feb 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237176 (Feb 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947003 (Jan 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749162 (Dec 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657829 (Dec 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527 (Dec 2023)

Here are links to lots of past explanations I've given about the principles we use to decide these questions more generally:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[leereeves]

If this topic merits discussion on HN, can you do something about the flagging? It seems like someone is flagging every comment to prevent discussion.

[dang]

Edit: oh, you were asking about comments. In my haste I missed that and thought you were asking about submissions.

There are lots of comments in this thread that aren't flagged, so discussion isn't being prevented. It's true that a lot of the earlier comments were flagged, but that was (or should be) because they were flamebait. It's one of the downsides of internet commenting that the flameiest and most reflexive comments appear first in a thread—because those reactions are the quickest to flare up. Better, more reflective comments always take longer [1]. This goes 1000x for a topic like this one, unfortunately.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

-- original reply --

I've answered that several times in the links I listed; can you take a look and, if there's something specific I haven't addressed, let me know?

(I don't mean to be dismissive—it just takes a surprising amount of time to write those things and I can't do it at the moment.)

[rat9988]

It's surprisingly dismissive. It's not that because not all of the comments aren't flagged that discussion isn't being prevented. And the (or should be) does most of the work when you talk about flagged are flagged because they were flamebait.

I'm pretty sure it's not an easy task to moderate HN. But I'm still surprised by the answer here.

[dang]

I'm sorry, but I don't follow your point here.

Keep in mind that I was commenting about the situation very early in the thread. My comment applies only to the very first comments that got posted—perhaps the first couple dozen—no later.

[pastacacioepepe]

I'm sorry to insist but there are groups here who abuse flagging as a censorship tool to suppress opinions they disagree with.

Anything that goes against the status quo has a high chance of being flagged, I've seen this happen over and over and especially recently.

[throwup238]

Especially since it only takes two accounts to flag a comment.

[incognos]

To prevent the flagging you would have to block an entire country which has an army of people trying to prevent discussion as we speak.

[hersko]

Hey Dang, huge fan of HN.

How do you reconcile HN's political neutrality and the fact that almost every overtly political story that hits the front page about certain subjects[1] are blatantly biased on one side?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435324

[bawolff]

I think part of it is the current situation lends itself to more pro-gaza headlines.

For starters the situation is evolving more on that front. Every new action is a potential headline for palestine. On the other hand Israel's position is much more static: They want to prevent the slaughter on oct 7 from happening again, and are using force to do so. That hasn't changed. You can't make new headlines out of it.

Its probably also inherent to the fact that Israel is currently on the offensive, outside of its territory in an asymetrical urban conflict. The optics on that are always going to be bad for the state in Israel's position regardless of how justified it is. Urban conflict is always a bloody mess, same with asymetric conflicts.

When israel bombs a hospital that makes a great headline. Its easy to understand and verify - hospital used to be there, now it is not. Its emotional - everyone knows in normal circumstances hospitals are supposed to be off limits. The Israeli side is hard to fit into a headline - hospital bombed after it became a military target due to use by militants, in accordance with international law and the principles of porportionality and distinction. For starters that is a mouthful to be a headline. It lacks emotional punch because now we are talking about legalese not deaths of innocets. Its hard to understand - most non experts do not know what the doctrine of porportionality& distinction is. Even if they do, we do not know in the fog of war what israel knew when targeting it and if it was reasonable at the time. Even if we did, where precisely the line is can be controversially grey. Its not like there is a huge amount of case law on this. Determing if it was legal would probably require hundreds of pages of legal argumentation. Even then, there is a whole other question of if the line international law draws is the correct one morally, which you could write a book on. Its just very hard to put all that in a news article.

So i don't think it is HN's fault that most of these articles lean more anti-israel. Its just much easier to write about things from that perspective. It is much more black and white and requires much less nuance and context.

[jay-barronville]

This isn’t rocket science. Israel has killed more than 13,000 children in less than 5 months. This is only counting the children. That’s almost 4.5 9/11’s in children alone. And our (Americans) taxpayer dollars is helping sponsor these war crimes.

Israel has one of the most advanced military and intelligence apparatuses in the world. And Palestinians are some of the most surveilled humans in the world. Israel knows where they’re dropping the bombs and the demographics of the humans who live there. No amount of gaslighting the international community and unsophisticated normies changes this fact. There’s no excuse for these war crimes and it’s an utter shame that the West, led by America, continue to allow Israel to use the tragic events of October 7th as an excuse to murder innocent Palestinian civilians (most of whom are children).

[gataca]

Setting aside the fact that these are numbers provided by Hamas, the same people who claimed 500 people died in a hospital Israel bombed but when it was revealed their own rocket bombed it the casualty numbers dropped 10-fold, war isn’t arithmetic.

The United States killed many more Japanese civilians than American civilians who died during the war, that doesn’t make them right. Hamas has miles of tunnels to provide cover for their rapists but doesn’t allow civilians to shelter, it’s tragic that Hamas is killing its own people this way but Israel should continue until Hamas is defeated like Germany was.

[YavuzKrgl]

It turned out that the footage presented by israel as "a rocket fired by the Islamic Jihad fell on the hospital" was a lie.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32Qp8hVg9X0

[gryzzly]

TRT is a Turkish public broadcast service. Erdogan openly supports Hamas.

[incognos]

For the record, it was debunked that it was a Hamas rocket as none of them had that potential yield and still do not. The ordinance for that explosion only had one provenance: the United States.

[jay-barronville]

I asked them to source their claim [0]. Let’s see if they can do it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39628938

[jay-barronville]

> Setting aside the fact that these are numbers provided by Hamas […]

This is an unserious argument.

1. The numbers come from Gaza’s Ministry of Health, which is indeed “controlled” by Hamas since Hamas is their governing entity.

2. The Ministry has no verifiable history of being wrong on the civilian casualty numbers. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: The Ministry’s numbers have held up to scrutiny in ALL of the previous wars (including scrutiny from Israel) [0].

3. The Biden Administration has corroborated the numbers.

4. Israel hasn’t denied the numbers. In fact, in one report from the IDF a couple months ago, they corroborated the Ministry’s numbers at the time.

5. The same silly argument could be made to dismiss just about anything coming from Israel given their documented history of lying and even manipulating our (American) media, from lies about beheaded babies [1] to pushing propaganda via U.S. media outlets like the New York Times [2].

> The United States killed many more Japanese civilians than American civilians who died during the war, that doesn’t make them right. […]

This is just a whataboutism and another unserious argument.

One evil act doesn’t justify another evil act. This is as serious of an argument as someone trying to justify slavery in 2024 by pointing to America’s history with slavery.

[0]: https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-health-mini...

[1]: https://theintercept.com/2023/12/14/israel-biden-beheaded-ba...

[2]: https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schw...

[gataca]

> The Ministry has no verifiable history of being wrong on the civilian casualty numbers

This is laughable. They claimed that Israel bombed a hospital and killed 500 people that the Palestinians themselves bombed. You are either hopelessly biased and unserious or uninformed.

[GordonS]

> Setting aside the fact that these are numbers provided by Hamas

The UN and Lancet [0] believe the numbers are credible. Let's not forget there are likely 10k+ civilians still burried under rubble too.

> Hamas has miles of tunnels to provide cover for their rapists

Come on, you are not commenting in good faith. There is zero credible evidence that any rape took place, Hamas have staunchly denied it, and from what returning hostages have said it seems incredibly unlikely. There is however an abundance of evidence that Israel is trying to use rape as attrocity propaganda.

> it’s tragic that Hamas is killing its own people this way

This is absolutely absurd - it's like telling a domestic violence victim it's their own fault.

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[reducesuffering]

What happened to “believe women?”

You think in a sudden 1143 person civilian homicidal attack, going door to door, no rape happened?

“UN team says rape, gang rape likely occurred during Hamas attack on Israel”

UN: “The mission team received clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment occurred against some women and children during their time in captivity.”

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-team-says-rape-...

https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/wp-content/uploa...

[dang]

I think it's a legit concern and it worries me too.

We can only go by the articles that users submit, and then only the subset we see, which is a function of (a) randomness and (b) users bringing specific cases to our attention. If there's a bias in the stories that have made HN's front page, that bias is present in the underlying data (I mean this stream of articles) to begin with. Why might that be? Well, there are a lot of possible reasons and people would most likely dispute about those as much as they do about the underlying topic.

For what it's worth (which may not be much), all I can tell you is that we want deeply, and are trying hard, to be even-handed. At the same time, we're not going to apply some sort of mechanical both-sides balancing because, although it might make things superficially easier in the short term, I don't think it would be in the spirit of the site, and we don't do that about anything else.

The even-handedness I'm talking about is probably easier to notice in our moderation of comments, so far, than of the articles. I feel pretty confident that we've done a good job of that [1], more than I am about the articles. Perhaps that's because there have been thousands of comments, but only a handful of frontpage articles, on the topic. One consistent lesson of HN is that you can't draw general conclusions from a handful of datapoints. It takes a lot more than that before reliable patterns show up.

What matters to me is that there be principles underlying the moderation and that these get applied equally. This isn't fully achievable because there's always interpretation involved—we don't get every call right. But I think the principles are the right ones for HN (I've explained what these are in the links mentioned above), and I'm always open to hearing arguments about how to apply them more even-handedly. When people make a fair point, such as xyzelement did about the submitted URL of the OP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39621225), we're happy to change something. Another example that sticks in my mind is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146630 from a few weeks ago. That was about title, not URL, but the principle is the same.

I don't know how satisfactory this answer can possibly be but I hope it's at least clear that I hear you and care about the question.

[1] That is, when people break HN's rules in the comments, such as by posting flamebait or snark or personal attack, we flag and/or reply and/or ban irrespective of what the commenter is for or against. It might not appear that way to many readers who have strong passions on a topic, but it's not as hard to do as one might assume, especially after 10 years of practice.

[beloch]

"If there's a bias in the stories that have made HN's front page, that bias is present in the underlying data (I mean this stream of articles) to begin with"

This really cannot be understated. HackerNews draws an educated demographic, which generally tends to be centrist, perhaps leaning a bit to the centre-left. Remember, this is based on demographics. Individual exceptions will occur but do not prove the rule.

The uncomfortable thing about political discussions is that most (not all) of them occur over things for which there isn't a clear-cut scientific consensus. If something is truly clear cut and self evident, then it usually won't turn into a political issue. You can set up an argument that is unassailable from one viewpoint but which crumbles from another. Two people who are reasonable and logical can have stark disagreements over political issues because of how they approach the issue. When people we respect and admire express political views that do not match our own, it can be disquieting.

The most important thing is to maintain respect for each other, even when we disagree. Political discussions on HackerNews usually don't descend into flame-wars, and I appreciate that. Perhaps you've hit on something important by limiting the frequency of such discussions. If they occur infrequently enough that they aren't a constant irritant, perhaps its easier for participants to keep their cool.

[matsemann]

FWIW, it's also easy to claim HN is biased, because people are biased differently, and HN is close to global.

As a northern european, I for instance would say that I often find HN trend conservative, compared to the discourses in my country. But someone from a different part of the world could claim HN to lean progressive, based on their political environment.

So I don't think there is an easy way here. If one were to decide that HN should balance both-sides, who draws where the middle lies?

[kome]

I agree with you. From my Southern European perspective, I don't find this site particularly "progressive" at all. I would describe most of the comments as liberal or centre-right.

And indeed, there is no solution here other than to be tolerant of other opinions, which may come from very different contexts than your own.

american foreign policy often becomes european union migration policy. just remember that, for example, when discussing international affairs.

Having said that, I have to say that HN is one of the communities that is better at dealing with different opinions, from different places. It's much harder on Reddit. On Metafilter, it is absolutely impossible: anything far from mainstream American liberalism is considered taboo.

[dang]

That's a really important point which is unfortunately barely understood at all. I tried to write about it here one time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.

The only thing I'd add to your point is that while HN is certainly global (or let's say highly international), the community is still overwhelmingly from Western countries. (Not all hold pro-Western views, of course, but that's different.) This means that users from non-Western countries who want to contribute views that go against what is commonly believed in the West, have a hard time. We do what we can to help, but unfortunately it's not much, because the forces of large numbers and group psychology are unstoppable, especially together.

[hef19898]

Well, there are things that cannot be bozt-sided:

Everything that violates human right for example. Or direct threats to democracy.

[mlrtime]

I'd be interested in reading a thoughtful discussion on what happened to El Salvador in HN.

I haven't come across one yet.

[mistermann]

Some of us will happily take the non-normative side on things like this as well.

[hef19898]

I take issue with people taking a "non-normative" approach on things like human rights. Especially if donso happily!

[wolverine876]

dang - Productive and honest public discourse is arguably the most important issue in the world right now - arguably our greatest need. And that seems to depend on moderation.

Ideally, with sufficiently effective moderation technique any groups could be brought together and talk it out. We'll never reach that ideal but my point is, moderation has incredible potential value.

You've done a good job of it here, you're thoughtful about it, probably you have studied and learned more than fits in HN comments. You might do whatever research remains and write a book. I hope you will!

> I'm always open to hearing arguments about how to apply them more even-handedly. When people make a fair point, such as xyzelement did about the submitted URL of the OP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39621225), we're happy to change something. Another example that sticks in my mind is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146630 from a few weeks ago. That was about title, not URL, but the principle is the same.

Probably you've thought of it, but it's not even-handed when strict scrutiny is applied to some positions but not others. OTOH, I appreciate that hot topics get a different level of scrutiny.

[dang]

I don't understand what you mean here:

> strict scrutiny is applied to some positions but not others

Can you explain?

[wolverine876]

Because you ask, I'll lay it out in more detail. But it's a general point that might not even apply in these cases (it's only two mod actions and so not a lot of data points) so I don't mean to over-emphasize it:

The two changes you listed and I quoted, while I think they improve the quality of those OPs, resulted from a level of scrutiny that seems higher than what most OPs receive.

Imagine Vim and Emacs users were again at odds. And imagine that Vim users raised every possible objection to Emacs OPs, resulting in a lot of extra scrutiny of the Emacs posts. Even if each mod action was even-handed, overall the actions wouldn't be even-handed between Vim and Emacs.

But as I said, the Gaza war is a very hot topic and extra scrutiny seems like a good idea. Anything that cuts down on unsubstantiated claims seems especially good.

[hersko]

Thanks for the response. I guess i just don't understand why some political stories make it through, when the vast majority (like this one[1]) are rightfully flagged.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39622270

[dang]

If you look at the links I listed in my GP comment, I've posted quite a few explanations of how and when we turn off the flags on an article. If there's a question I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.

[throwawayhate]

Thank you for explaining this a bit more.

There are things sometimes that don't have two sides to balance out perspectives.

Not a lot of them, but there are for sure.

Difficult conversations often require the ability to reflect and contemplate on one's own understanding before being quick to validate it and reinforce it by putting it on others.

[hayst4ck]

Saying something is biased on one side and therefore wrong or unfair is incorrect because it denies the idea of objective truth.

If there is no such thing as objective truth, then nobody has any foundation upon which to make any judgements, and therefore power alone becomes the ultimate arbiter or conflict.

The idea that there is no objective truth is a core tenet of fascism.

So in a "curious" place you would expect openness to new explanations, but you would also expect one-sided-ness because there is an objective truth to approach and the purpose of curiosity is to approach that truth.

If there is no objective truth, there is no reason to be curious.

If there is an objective truth, then there is no reason to complain about one-sided-ness because what matters is our best approximation of the truth.

A quote from Yale professor of history Timothy Snyder's book: On Tyranny

     To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.
   If nothing is true, then no one can criticize
  power, because there is no basis upon which
      to do so. If nothing is true, then all is
      spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for
           the most blinding lights.