Ask HN: Why was the VICE video report on China's Uighur situation flagged?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336543
was (as is usually on Hacker News) silently flagged and removed. The submission linked to this YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ
which is titled "China’s Vanishing Muslims: Undercover In The Most Dystopian Place In The World". As far as I remember, the Hacker News submission title was not editorialzed or sensational.
Again as usual on Hacker News, there is no moderator message that says why this post was flagged and removed.
Hacker News is obviously heavily moderated. But I found the moderation to be rather silent a lot, seeing title's changed, link's changed, and comments flagged without any clear information or often no information at all as to why. The fact that this particular post was removed is extra bothersome to me. There are other articles that have been allowed through, including this one:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xgame/at-chinese-border-tourists-forced-to-install-a-text-stealing-piece-of-malware
The original video obviously contains political content, but it also shows the repercussions of technology. That is an important thing to discuss. Engineers are supposed to build technology that helps people, and if conversations regarding that goal are silenced, it is worrisome.
At a bare minimum, I would like to see the rather aggressive moderation team at Hacker News be more upfront with the edits they make to submissions.