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Comment by void_nill | Hacker News Reader

Since this entry was flagged without justification, which shows me that censorship is taking place, I will not use HN in the future or support it in any other way. I will discuss with my lawyer how I can enforce the deletion of my account according to European guidelines.

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> flagged without justification

From the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This story was not only covered in TV news, it literally was the TV news.

That flag indicates users flagged it--it doesn't mean any action has been taken by HN staff. It's essentially been reported to moderators by users, but unless you see the "[dead]" tag, it remains public and alive on HN.

User-flagged content can be pushed down on the rankings (comparable to a downvote), but if enough people upvote, it shouldn't make much difference.

The post is gone effectively from HN already. There are enough 'new' accounts (incl. top post) that just press 'flag'

I thought you couldn't flag until you had some minimum level of karma, no?

It is 51 karma, which is quite low to clear as it takes only 10 to be x-upvote. OP - used to be 140+ points, which should put it easily on the 1st page - but it's flagged and gone.

Got it, thanks. I think I'd be okay with an even higher threshold before you get some kind of quasi-moderation powers. 250-500+ somewhere.

I could be mistaken but I thought even though users have the ability to flag a post the post itself doesn’t become “flagged” until several different people flag it.

Of course. That's the point: creating new accounts and getting 51 karma is not hard - there are no requirements to be "different people", just different accounts.

The flags were overwhelmingly by long-established users including many whose past comments suggest that their sympathies would be with CNN in this situation.

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23349814)? They ask you not to post like this for a reason. The reason is that the posts are nearly always wrong. Probably more than 99% of the time even if one counts generously.

It's current story #24, with 222 up points.

The story likely got reviewed and unflagged. Yet, it just went puff few minutes after making it to top 10 or so while it still had quite massive (140+ or 160+) points. It was gone for quite some hour.

The reply was about the fact the upvotes do not work well enough in contrast to flagging.

The flagging was done by users. HN doesn't want political arguments, which this is turning into. It's well within Y Combinator's rights to create a user-controlled off-topic flagging system. The moderators can restore this if they want to and cancel the flags.

Thanks for posting this. Much appreciated. Sad that it's being flagged.

I agree, I’ll also be sending a GDRP request.

It's sad how bad the echo chamber is getting recently.

Yet another black man dead to police violence and it gets flagged when a post about it stays up. This happened days ago (George Floyd being murdered, not this arrest), this is the 1st post to stick and gets flagged instantly, but there are how many posts about the Twitter/Trump fued?

Seems more and more recently that we simply aren't allowed to discuss certain things here at all. Pretending they aren't happening because discussion would be too hard doesn't make them go away.

edit to clarify George Floyd died days ago

There is nothing to discuss about the George Floyd story. The cops seriously fucked up. I have yet to see anyone dispute that. I haven't even seen a union remark defending the cop. This is not the place to check out the latest news stories. You want the latest news stories, go to Google, Yahoo, CNN, or where ever.

As for the Twitter/Trump feud, there is still debate on whether Twitter has grown into something which is a public space. While the Supreme Court has not declared social media the modern public square, they have referred to it as the modern public square in a ruling. It is worth to debate whether and what types of rules should be applied to the dominate social media sites. They certainly are moving away from just hosting for user content.

It's time to start demanding more. If the constitution of this website claims this topic is irrelevant, vote with your actions and/or demand that the rules are changed.

This story should not leave our mouths and ears until something is done.

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