Hacker News Reader

Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Remarkable that it seems to be only white woman victims that reach HN's front page. Implicit cultural acknowledgement that brown men *belong* in cages, chained "like Hannibal Lecter", or whatever the hyperbole of the day is.

For every shocking depravity involving a European tourist, there's a thousand other human stories some media circles will never acknowledge. Read testimonies from people who aren't born into the right ethnicity. (If you want content warnings about suicide attempts, this one has three different methods).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/02/25/guanta... ("Three migrants describe Guantánamo detention")

https://archive.is/KV3hr

These people have families too. Countless stories on other sites of families pleading for the disappeared, pleading their innocence.

View on HN

Other stories make it too. Any stories on this topic often exit the frontpage due to how the algorithm works around political topics.

This one about deportations to veneuzuela got flagged, but was on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43381043

Same with this story about a Lebanese professor from Brown who was deported: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43384730

They all reached the front page.

The top comment on the story about the canadian woman detained suggests the article was ALSO flagged, and must have been unflagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43411777

It is a reasonable expectation that this article will also be flagged. If any political story gets popular and heated enough some people flag it.

Update: This thread itself has been flagged off the front page

There is also the (male) French professor's story who attempted to enter US for a conference and was sent back because they searched his phone and found some criticism to trump's policies, not sure how close to the frontpage it made it but it is currently flagged [0]. I think one problem is that there are too many stories on more or less the same topic, but each of them has a bit different angle.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43418059

Even this current thread seems to have gotten demoted out of front page.

Clearly we are all just supposed to keep our heads down, be quiet, and work on LLMs for VC to get rich off of.

It's not any political story -- the site is definitely biased against certain kinds of political stories.

People voraciously upvote and argue about California zoning laws or San Francisco drug policy here and the moderation staff encourages this. Or AI policies from the US federal government or the DMA from the EU. Or the SLS rocket.

'political' is just used as a euphemism for 'taboo' and there are many unspoken taboos about what is talked and not talked about here.

I think the most likely case is users are less likely to flag those stories. Or, they're less likely to generate discussion that causes those stories to get flagged.

When I use the term 'the site' I mean both the owners, moderators and users as a collective whole.

There's a sort of unspoken symbiosis going on between the users who consistently flag certain kinds of stories for ideological purposes and the owners/moderators who are content to let them do that.

Yeah, there's definitely inequality in reporting, Wikipedia has an article called Missing White Woman Syndrome that I think is exactly the phenomenon you're discussing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome

> Missing white woman syndrome is a term used by some social scientists and media commentators to denote perceived disproportionate media coverage, especially on television, of missing-person cases toward white females as compared to males, or females of color. Supporters of the phenomenon posit that it encompasses supposed disproportionate media attention to females who are young, attractive, white, and upper middle class. Although the term was coined in the context of missing-person cases, it is sometimes used of coverage of other violent crimes. The phenomenon has been highlighted in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and other predominantly white countries, as well as South Africa.

Due to that, white women are the canary in the coal mine. If you hear about them being mistreated, it's that there are invisible crowds of people already mistreated you're not seeing.

It's true that this was happening already for less privileged people entering the US (esp non-white, muslim-looking immigrants from poorer, non-western countries), and def not just in the US. Nobody should actually think that the US now is doing sth nobody else did to anybody, and other western democracies are saints in how they have been treating these people. I guess this specific part is "news" because it shows that it is also happening -to an extent- to more privileged people now, which was less of a thing right now. It is not about a shock or whatever, but about learning a shift in certain policies that informs some people (closer to the audience of this site even) of how the current situation shifts in order to be able to make an informed risk assessment over a possibility of traveling to the US. This way, one can in a more informed way decide if traveling to the US right now is worth the whatever risks vs the desired outcome. I assume part of the whole ordeal is exactly about this in the first place, to discourage some groups(?) of people from attempting to enter the US.

I also assume that there is indeed some change in this situation wrt european visitors rather than more coverage, because germany actually updated their travel advisory on the US to inform about entering through a visa becoming more strict and uncertain [0]. So while I agree that there is a strong moral issue here wrt to how immigrants are treated, this does not mean that this piece of news does not warrant its own coverage.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-updates-us-trav...

Yet, even those stories were missing from mainstream media. We are at a turning point and even these stories selected with racial bias help us to understand Trumpler's bullshit smokescreen of "deporting only the violent" undocumented immigrants. This at this point is a rouge department largely staffed with the worst of the racist xenophobic misanthropes.

These stories of white English speaking women are of course also flagged off the home page. HN doesn't really want to know about any negative side effects from the current regime.

> HN doesn't really want to know about any negative side effects from the current regime.

I don't think this is (necessarily) true. There are people who flag these stories. That's all. They might be a minority.

this seems like one of the perfect occasions to take a more charitable view. people get overloaded with things they can't do much about.

I think you're quite mistaking nationalism for racism -- the former the most widespread basis for tribal affiliation in the world. In my case, it's more that it's a UK citizen which raises my eyebrows.

While I feel some disappointment and regret over how people of other countries might be treated by US immigration, I feel no sense of "tribal injury" as I do here. In other words, my instinct to say, "how dare a person from my country be treated this way!" is not aroused when it isnt my country.

Skin colour is irrelevant, and I'dve very much the same reaction either way. As would the vast majority of people in the UK who, if racist, are towards people from south-east asia not south america (races for which we have no real experience).

It is quite common that people from one nation take issue with their nationals being mistreated --- the reason this is on the front page of HN is that it's an english-speaking country (this is an english site), a european one with some common cultural affiliation, and a reasonably powerful one (one whose voice on the matter has an outsized impact vs. population size, sauy).

Yep. I'm a white boy citizen and they've shackled and chained ( and strip searched) me before for funzies, no one gives a shit unless you're a well off European tourist or white lady. People think it's new, happened to me under Bidens administration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com