I might be missing something here - why would people flag it? HN has never struck me as being this petty. Anal retentive, pedantic, and difficult (citation required, sigh). What am I missing?
The fact that someone is trying so hard to make this become controversial and news-worthy is the only interesting thing here.
Flagging is just supposed to summon a moderator and that's all.
So, the Lessig post could've been flagged, the comments on it could've triggered the flame war code, or a moderator did it.
What almost definitely didn't happen is "Apple fan boys at work" flagging down anything anti-Apple. When you use the flag link any more than extremely sparingly, you lose the privilege, permanently.
Psychologically, the UI seems intended to separate "I don't like this" from "I think this content is detrimental to the site". This communicates that users should not attempt to punish links they simply dislike, but may do so with comments.
Company screws up some software upgrade, hundreds of uses swam their forums and complain. Who would be served from 100s of threads about the same thing with no solutions?
It's generally not "censhorship" unless the government does it. Your speech is not being suppressed by Apple not wanting spam in their forums. It's not some deep conspiracy to drive up Apple stock price.
So who really cares? Someone who has not upgraded to the latest iOS and needs WiFi access to drive his life critical system?
It's actually [citation needed]. ;).