At least the third time this year, but every post on HN related to grok's prompt gets flagged soon after, with a rigor not shared by any other political or "celebrity" topic.
There was also at least one giant thread about the Grok South Africa thing.
And you can't just blame people flagging the stories - people ask for them to be whitelisted and are gaslit in response. No surprise, maybe, when Garry Tan and PG are writing fluffy tweets about Musk and the DOGE team.
Examples:
"Musk’s DOGE Goons Surreptitiously Transmitted Reams of White House Data" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44258556
(Is it new that flagged stories don't link where they used to?)
"Doge cuts to USAid blamed for 300k deaths – most of them children" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142790
"Tornado warnings delayed because of DOGE cuts" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018247
"Elon Musk's Doge Moves to Gut Local Libraries While No One Is Looking" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43445571
"Doge Claimed It Saved $8B in One Contract. It Was $8M" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101757 (eventually unflagged).
"EFF Sues DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43020091 (unflagged after hours)
"Elon Musk's rapid unscheduled disassembly of the US government" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43007319
... And so on.
I started keeping a list of falsely flagged stories that I noticed in my favorites recently, and it has grown quite large. Everything Musk is a dominant theme.
We're not even allowed to discuss this censorship outside of comments: "Ask HN: What's with flagging articles criticizing Musk?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907426 (There are many other examples of this, and it is explicitly HN policy not to permit discussing the flagging policies here, ie, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058574.)
Yet prolific commenters here will still praise HN for having such little censorship - it's pretty disturbing.
1. Major tech company 2. Major failure of a tech product 3. A public relations disaster for AI
Of course this is a legitimate topic for discussion. Flagging it is bullshit.
But then there are submissions like this one that are clearly tech-related: prominent AI alignment issues have to be topical here on HN. Or this one I recently submitted which was at the time new breaking revelations about the TikTok ban: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461158. Also directly tech-related. And both posts have 100+ upvotes while still remaining flagged. It's definitely frustrating.