HN Explorer

Ask HN: Could we please not bury our heads in the sand?

6 points by Kepler-125c ↗ HN
During the news blackout, this deeply disturbing piece of news got overlooked:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-10/senate-quietly-passes-countering-disinformation-and-propaganda-act

I'm trying to resubmit it but it says "Link has already been submitted". But the link is not viewable because of the blackout.

You are blacking out people complaining about the loss of freedom of speech.

5 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 24.8 ms ] thread
ebcode
For real. The word "hacker", and the spirit it implies, is quickly losing its meaning here.

"Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for." -- The Hacker Manifesto

internaut
Ask dang or scott to remove the block. Measures involving law and information are definitely in our domain.

It didn't just slip under HN's radar because of the temp ban on politics, my search results show Congress website, Wikipedia, Infowars and some forums. "Quiet" is understatement.

That there is jack shit from any media outlets hints that maybe a state order has gone out.

Otherwise I have to believe the major media has no interest in a law explicitly about #fakenews when they've been bitching about little else for the past two weeks.

dang
Most purely-political sites are banned on HN because pure politics are off topic here. zerohedge.com has been in that category here since August 2010. That doesn't mean it's a bad site or (heaven forbid) that we disagree with it. It just means it's reliably a source of off-topic content for HN, as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If you think an article there is particularly substantive you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask us to take a look, but please distinguish between particularly substantive and particularly good at riling up the reader. Sites that specialize in the latter are just what we don't want on HN, regardless of their politics.

If the story itself is important but the article not particularly substantive (or at least not enough to justify unbanning an entire site), I'm sure you can find another article reporting on the same thing.

kafkaesq
Here's a link to a submission from a non-ZH source:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13163941

Now that dang's temporary "no politics, please" request has expired, the content matter seems to fit perfectly within HN guidelines (to wit: not "pure politics", and from a reliable, non-political source).

3131s
And it's law...

I submitted the Wikipedia article about it today, and it got 3 points.

Instead of discussing this, there's a lively discussion on the front page about the US retaliating militarily against Russia for supposed election hacking and plenty of "hackers" engaging in cold war style saber-rattling.