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Comment by Nicksil | Hacker News Reader

There was a thread a couple of days where this user commented the same thing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24571360

As of this writing, the post from two days ago, as well as the post to which I am replying, are rather down-voted and nearing transparency. I can't imagine why some folks would be against this information getting out there. If this story proves untrue, it's a pretty big deal and the publisher should be held to account. We should all demand better from our news sources. Regardless of outcome, what's the benefit drawn from down-voting a (potentially smug) reference to the impassioned discussion this story produced here on Hacker News?

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I'm not one of the down-voters but I would guess that the use of the word 'hysterically' most likely triggered it. Whether or not the poster meant it in that way, it comes across as slightly flame-baity.

I would argue that the word is exactly right. Everyone who has been paying attention for the last four years knows the playbook. It's been literally dozens of times:

A bunch of NGOs or "government officials" make a ruckus, a handful of previously unknown people (usually women) make an accusation. No evidence besides "anonymous sources" and the whole nine yards. Days later, turns out it's all made up. That happened with almost every single one of "these" stories.

Unfortunately HN is currently even more politically charged than normal, so political stories survive since everyone is ignoring the rules. So a lie makes it into the minds of thousands. The later revealed truth is censored again, closing the circle.

That happened with multiple covid stories here (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22730165 ) as well as political ones. I think HN should either enforce the rules, or push the following updates to the same spot on the site as the original lies.

I sense your frustration and I suspect that the Mods often wished everyone would respect the ideals of HN by following the submission guidelines -

" What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

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. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wish HN would introduce a 'Reason for Flagging' button choice (Spam, Off-Topic, Flame-Bait, Other). Speaking generally, I only flag the most egregious examples of Spam or Self-Advertising submissions. Any political submissions, I simply skip viewing or clicking (submission rankings partially use the CTR weight) because I am almost certainly guaranteed to see comments that degenerate in to 4Chan or Reddit levels and that is not what I come to HN for.

It from the fake hate crime playbook; outrage on page 1, redaction on page 14.

Most of my knowledge in the field that I can provide [citation needed] levels of responses to are based on de-classified government documents but here are some links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/nudge-units-wher...

PLEASE NOTE! I'm not talking about this particular instance, nor about the cause of it (nor on the original post from a few days back).

Sometimes it is best to simply take a deep breath and consider the sage old advice of 'Don't Feed the Trolls'.

whoops... meant retraction

I'd appreciate a ban on political posts here. The amount of schills and astroturfing is turning HN into any other social network.

They are banned. More or less at least.

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