It could upset some Republicans. HN at some point decided to hide any sort of controversial story.

It arguably doesn’t much matter in this case, where it’s hard not to hear about it in some way. In other cases, it strikes me as an abdication of responsibility.

Most recently, as but one example, when the tech community embarked on their ethics-in-astronomy harassment campaign against a female programmer: HN was one of the fora where this actually happened, but all submissions of stories on it, from reputable mainstream news sources, were quickly flagged into oblivion.