Greenwald: The secret services are spying on politicians with oversight roles
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Are political topics allowed/removed based on personal preference?
I have no clue how it went down, I'm just a rando HN commenter, but don't ascribe to careless human moderation that which can be adequately explained by automated moderation.
There's definitely a sizable crowd that prefers HN to be more about hacking and less about politics, let alone divisive discussions about intelligence services, the person of Glenn Greenwald and so on. Also I wouldn't be surprised if HN has a lower flag->dead threshold for video links.
I'm newish to HN so it's a genuine question, I've not observed enough moderation here to really know how it works. It's the first time I've seen a post disappear and since this is the kind of topic that gets censored on other social media sites it made me suspicious.
I'm pretty sure being-on-the-front-page-of-HN is not a measure of moral judgment.
Many people here consider politics categorically off topic (which it really isn't) and will flag such articles on principle.
>and it takes very little effort to flag an article, by design.
I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone on HN how such a design can be easily abused. A single entity could get undesirable submissions removed by running multiple accounts.
Nothing is really removed from HN, only marked invisible. You can see it if you turn the showdead option on in your profile.
And you can contact the mods in the email field below but they tend not to give specific details.
>A single entity could get undesirable submissions removed by running multiple accounts.
Sure, but this forum is so aggressively moderated that it really wouldn't matter. If the mods feel a story doesn't deserve to be flagged, they'll unflag it. If they feel it doesn't deserve to be as popular as it is, they'll sink it. Users will flag and downvote for any number of reasons (since there are no guidelines for voting here.) There are so many invisible strings being pulled on these threads that it's impossible to read any specific motive into anything.
He does not do news, he does biased opinion pieces. And in my experience he often does them dishonestly. He also has a tedency to hint at conspiracy.
Hence I generally do not trust what he says. And I think that Tucker Carlson saying that the CIA is spying on politicians actually weakens the message. Even though in this case the message is true.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
3 letter agencies can be interesting, though spying is not news in general.
If you see an A which goes one way and B which goes another way, don't forget randomness as a possible explanation—it's actually the leading factor.
Not all political submissions are off topic on HN, but most are. Many past explanations of how we approach this question are at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
> Inquiry by C.I.A. Affirms It Spied on Senate Panel — An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program.
> The report by the agency’s inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers read the emails of the Senate investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information, according to a summary of findings made public on Thursday. One official with knowledge of the report’s conclusions said the investigation also discovered that the officers created a false online identity to gain access on more than one occasion to computers used by the committee staff.
Obama's DOJ spied on Trump, his family and his campaign associates and unmasked them. He along with Biden also unmasked General Flynn. Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer, fabricated emails to get FISA warrants on Carter Page and spied on them. Clinesmith didn't even get any prison sentence and is going back to practicing law next month.
Adam Schiff published the phone records of the president's personal attorneys, a journalist, a fellow lawmaker, a National Security Council aide, and others.
As of last week, Biden's doj spied, unmasked and leaked Tucker Carlson's email to Axios.
So lets not be partisans and pretend that this is a Republican specific thing.
Greenwald is on Fox to speak to people who would otherwise never hear a message from anyone like Greenwald. Not so that a reasonable person can conclude that Fox is as valid a source of info as any other.
What I found disappointing, is that Greenwald published the story without making sure Snowden had a place to land outside the reach of US jurisdiction -- regardless of any decision made between the two. Breaking the story is one thing, but doing the right thing for your source is another -- even if it means not being able to break the story first.