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Comment by elAhmo | Hacker News Reader

Purpose of flagging it to not have a discussion about this as it sheds a light about what is happening.

If you browse HN's recent history, you'll find that nearly every single "Google/Israel" related article that gained any traction has gotten flagged by readers. People are clearly abusing "flag" as a mega-downvote to bury discussions they don't want to see happening. Pretty sad. I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but I don't think this is appropriate behavior here. HN's "flamewar detector" should be enough to quickly move these stories off the front page if they get too hot. Why also flag?

Dang has to rescue pretty much every single Israel post as they are getting mass flagged to oblivion.

No, I flag them because, like this thread, 99% of comments are just political/social warfare and has nothing to do with technology. It's just an extension of the culture war. You can go on Reddit or Facebook or basically anywhere else on the internet to do your cultural warfare. Can we have a single place left where we don't fall into that pit?

Of course the protest is about technology -- it's about the provision of technology to governments who use that technology for war. Why wouldn't you expect the employees of these companies have a position on that?

Like a lot of people here, I have family who died in the Holocaust. It is highly likely that the camps they moved through were using tech supplied by IBM. Would it have been "culture warring" for tech employees circa 1938, to publicize the human rights abuses being enabled by their companies? Because that's what the people who support these protesters think is going on here.

When there's a genocide going on backed by the largest military power in the world, it should take up all the oxygen.

If you want to ignore it, just press "Hide" instead of "Flag."

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