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Comment by aptidude187 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how people were 'outraged' about 1 missing Journalist and flooded HN with articles about how evil the government of Saudi Arabia is ( which I agree with ) , but a more serious crime like genocide leaves HN disinterested. Would this be the same, if the perpetrators and victims were reversed ? I highly doubt it.

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What a weird what-about-ism. There have been a few other atrocities too, why are you not mentioning them?

Ultimately it has to do with how close political ties are maintained. After all it's more concerning if a family member whom you share living space with suddenly becomes unpredictable or violent as opposed to a neighbour 3 houses down the street.

"Tech execs will never come to a full realization of their platforms' roles in genocide and the rise in authoritarianism, in part because doing it would require an overwhelmingly traumatic personal reckoning." -- https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/10518563279522693...

We had a lot of coverage of the Myanmar genocide facilitated by Facebook and the comments were always very negative against Facebook here. You won't find much sympathy of the company on HN.

>We had a lot of coverage of the Myanmar genocide facilitated by Facebook and the comments were always very negative against Facebook here.

Not always. A surprising number of HN commenters in those threads supported both Facebook and the genocide.

Either way, HN was anything but disinterested.

> A surprising number of HN commenters in those threads supported both Facebook and the genocide.

I'm skeptical that there actually were non-grey comments in support of the genocide

Every one of them probably wound up being downvoted and flagged, but that doesn't require a majority of users. My point is that the sentiment was still expressed, so it exists as a facet of HN culture.

You won't find many threads where Islam, Muslims or immigrants are mentioned in which at least some anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bias doesn't appear, including this one.

Which specific comments in this thread as it stands indicate anti-muslim or anti-immigrant bias?

Edit: what did saana say that got them flagged out? Is this the one?

The Saana comment was pretty far out there.

Yes. It's safe to say that comment had anti-muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-minority bias.

There are many people like that in the world though. It's unreasonable to require them to not exist before we discuss topics like this. In fact, in a very real way, they are the entire reason we find ourselves needing to discuss topics like this.

Articles about politics are off-topic [1] on HN. Neither article should have made the front page nor aroused much attention.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The manipulation of social networking platforms such as Facebook by political actors (Myanmar's military) for the purpose of spreading disinformation with clear real-world consequences is patently 'on topic'.

You make a good point so long as that is the focus of the discussion. If on the otherhand, the discussion spins off into politics which it is already doing, then it is still off-topic because it is arousing off topic discussion.

This thread of conversation is more exactly and explicitly off-topic than conversations about 'politics', however.

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