Ask HN: Why can't we discuss Israel on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why can't we discuss Israel on HN?

11 pointscramsession17 comments

I just had a post shot to #2 on the front page, only to have it flagged 5 minutes later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46218640

It’s clearly relevant to this audience but it feels like there’s a very coordinated attack on any post that exposes Israeli crimes. Can we get some more moderation protection against brigading such posts? It doesn’t look good on HN that we’re essentially operating as an Israeli propaganda arm, censorship and all. I don’t think it’s the mods doing this, but they’re not stopping it.

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I turned off flags on that story when I saw it, long before I saw this post just now. You should have done as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and emailed hn@ycombinator.com about this rather than starting an off-topic meta thread. If you had, we could have fixed the problem sooner.

If you want a more general answer about how we moderate this topic, try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227485 (from a few minutes ago). For older explanations, here's a sample:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403947 (June 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 (April 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618973 (March 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435324 (Feb 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024 (Feb 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237176 (Feb 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947003 (Jan 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749162 (Dec 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527 (Dec 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252765 (May 2021)

p.s. Your submission history https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=cramsession is obviously against the site guidelines because you've been using HN primarily for political battle. Normally we'd ban such an account or take submission privileges away from it. We haven't done that in your case and I'm not going to do it right now (it feels unsporting to bust people in an extraneous context, even if they've been breaking the rules badly). But you should understand that using HN only to prosecute a political cause, even a just one, is a violation of this site.

If it's been flagged to death this is not a sign that it's clearly relevant, it's a sign people are deeply annoyed that "everything is palestine" submitters keep trying to drown the front page in it.

The irony is that if there was less effort to turn HN into settler-colonial studies, the odd story would be better received. Instead there are a handful of accounts that post nothing but Israel leading to other readers, flagging them on-sight, knowing that nothing good will come of the "debate" that will feature in the comments. Just the same ppl rehashing the same arguments & positions until everyone exhausts themselves.

8 of your last 10 posts are about the middle east - why? The site name is hacker news not israel news and not palestine news.

I think you’d find other sites a better recipient of your submissions. A cursory glance at your post history indicates the ‘Israel’ portion of the article far exceeds any ‘Tech’ interest.

Palantir is a tech company.

This doesn’t change the fact that you are hyper focused on Israel

You have it backwards, Israel is hyper focused on the US government, media and tech industry. I’m just one of their victims who’s had enough.

You can call yourself a victim of whoever you want, but that doesn't change the fact that from the perspective of other HN users, you are hyper focused on posting stories about a topic other users aren't interested in. Those users are flagging your stories. If you don't want them to flag, find stories about topics they are interested in, or find a site where people are interested in a non stop of stream of "Israel bad, US bad, <thing u like/support> bad, <thing I like/support> good" etc.

Because that particular article is biased in framing the pager attacks as a "terrorist attack" while, actually, those attacks were precisely targeted at Hezbollah personnel.

Those weren't devices for personal - or civilian - use, after all.

I'm just guessing here: Because the "discussion" is either direct propaganda, or people affected by the propaganda spreading the propaganda.

This is news, not propaganda. Palantir was involved in the pager attack.

It’s fair. We don’t discuss the October 7th massacre either, and that must be discussed before we discuss anything Israel has done since.

Whatever you think of Oct 7th, it doesn’t have anything to do with tech. Posts like these do.

Certain topics and keywords seem to get nuked VERY fast in new.

UN RES 1701 is being violated - in Lebanon -- the public news suppression is total from - HN point of view there is two questions - HOW and WHY -- The IDF has created a new adware insertion tools - that has the ability to drop malware by clicking on an ad -- infecting cell phones in 150 countries -- the test of the tool was to shutdown 28% of the internet in the last 30 days ( Cloudflare spin team reports 1 man gave a bad updated ) -- This was done Three times. Second this new tool can create false ad impressions - generating real profit from ads no human every saw - and because of the placement of malware the SLPP ( London based ) lawfare team can sue for millions if you don't pay. for google, meta and XAl the loss with be in the 100's millions on 4.5 Billion in total revenue. The real target is REAL news UN/1701 and YOU.

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