[takoid]

Earlier discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361024 (543 points, 57 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362149 (135 points, 8 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362214 (184 points, 34 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362032 (137 points, 30 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361571 (122 points, 7 comments)

[randomtoast]

And as all of these earlier discussions it will get flagged to death by trump supporters or trump supporter bots.

[Neil44]

It's not immediately clear to me why a news piece on a Salvadoran prison is relevant on HN, I guess that's why the flagging.

[estearum]

This forum discusses information freedom pretty much all day every day. Now we have a real world example of suppression of information in the US which is rather rare and people (see comments) using technology to evade it.

[Alive-in-2025]

I wish when stories get flagged it would list who flagged them

[websiteapi]

why do you think it's because of trump supporters, I'm curious if you have evidence of trump affiliated suppression on HN (notwithstanding the actual segment which could certainly be said to be trump suppressed) - maybe people just don't want politics on here. in any case there's one: Cecot – 60 Minutes (archive.org), on the front page anyway.

[ryandrake]

Obviously, nobody but the HN admins/mods know about flagging or voting patterns, and they don't talk about the details when these kinds of events happen. The most you'll hear is "We looked at it and manually removed the flags." So, it is impossible to provide the evidence you are asking for.

You see this here with other topics, too, not just things some people dismiss as "political". Submit any article that criticizes a certain multi-company tech CEO and it will be instantly flagged off the main page.

[websiteapi]

so you don't know but you keep saying it's because of pro trumpers...? why spread misinformation. you could just say that it keeps getting flagged without lying.

[etyhhgfff]

We cant know for sure, because unlike dang we cannot correlate the flags. However, there is something called circumstantial evidence, which can even hold up in court.

You went from curious to accusation of misinformation and lying in just two comments. Thats concerning.

[belorn]

Since we are talking about circumstantial evidence, lets bring alternative theories to the table so that we know we are not excluding other explanations for the same data.

People who are afraid that they will get attacked if their views do not conform to the majority are more likely to flag an article and move on rather than engage with the discussion. Articles do not require 50% of the participants to flag it in order for it to get flagged, thus this minority will cause articles to get flagged. The more hostile the community get to dissenting opinions, the more articles get flagged, with the most heated topics getting the majority of flagging.

[Alive-in-2025]

When a certain type of political commenting keeps getting repeatedly flagged, in this case things about oligarchs or conservatives who might have made mistakes and did bad things, it's pretty clear that it's probably conservatives who are complaining about it.

[websiteapi]

or, more likely - people are flagging because they don't even want politics on here to begin with

[jadamson]

The first one is still on the front page.

[takoid]

It was flagged off the front page yesterday. I'm not sure for how long, but you can read discussion about this in the thread itself.

[jadamson]

Fair point. There is actually a site that tracks this, and that post was off the front page for most of its existence:

https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=46361024

[tim333]

I doubt it's Trump supporters. One flagger who said why was he just flags anything that is politics and not 'hacking'. The official guide is

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

The longest discussion of a dozen or so was

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361024 (1543 points 530 comments)