We're being watched closely by the same people responsible for the behavior talked about in the article. Hacker News is not an oasis of free thought. It can be managed in its own way: unlike Reddit and Twitter and Facebook you can't just directly use raw power to do it, but you can keep a sharp eye on discourse and be vigilant about stamping out discourse that you don't like.

And this is the only way to do it: flag positive interest, and flag anybody saying anything you don't want said. And then accuse them of being a bot army or something. Bot armies don't work on Hacker News, but false flagging does. My assumption is that the threshold for taking action is low enough to be reached by an innocent-looking number of brigaded complaints.

This very article from the BBC and its multiple, stifled attempts to show up at all on Hacker News is evidence of this tactic being employed. The conversation around it's lively enough to demonstrate enough seed interest in article discussion, but just try and engage in such discussion.

Somebody is stifling this topic through attempts to use the rules of Hacker News against it.

Or, 'it's Tuesday'. In other words this is completely normal and to be expected given the conditions the article itself reports on. We're stuck going 'meta' even to talk about the article at all, because the management of such talk is coordinated, effective, and extensive.