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Ask HN: Why was the VICE video report on China's Uighur situation flagged?

8 points by nikofeyn ↗ HN
I noticed that this Hacker News submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336543

was (as is usually on Hacker News) silently flagged and removed. The submission linked to this YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ

which is titled "China’s Vanishing Muslims: Undercover In The Most Dystopian Place In The World". As far as I remember, the Hacker News submission title was not editorialzed or sensational.

Again as usual on Hacker News, there is no moderator message that says why this post was flagged and removed.

Hacker News is obviously heavily moderated. But I found the moderation to be rather silent a lot, seeing title's changed, link's changed, and comments flagged without any clear information or often no information at all as to why. The fact that this particular post was removed is extra bothersome to me. There are other articles that have been allowed through, including this one:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xgame/at-chinese-border-tourists-forced-to-install-a-text-stealing-piece-of-malware

The original video obviously contains political content, but it also shows the repercussions of technology. That is an important thing to discuss. Engineers are supposed to build technology that helps people, and if conversations regarding that goal are silenced, it is worrisome.

At a bare minimum, I would like to see the rather aggressive moderation team at Hacker News be more upfront with the edits they make to submissions.

6 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 25.4 ms ] thread
nikofeyn
rather curiously, the submission has been unflagged now mere seconds after i submitted this. it's possible it happened right before this submission, but it had been flagged for many minutes before i submitted this, including just a minute or so before since i checked the link.
dang
That is because some users were flagging and other users were vouching.
gus_massa
Just guessing. Probably because it's very similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20335816 (228 points, 3 hours ago, 179 comments) dupes and almost-dupes are usually moved downward to keep a more diverse front page and keep the conversation together and avoid duplication of comments. If the other post have a lot of new information, you can add a comment there and email the mods hn@ycombinator.com so they remove the penalty.

> Hacker News is obviously heavily moderated.

I agree with that, but it's not so obvious. (I think that they must add a warning about the heavy moderation at the top of the site with <blink> and <marquee>, but they prefer the clean simple look. :) )

dang
Users flagged it. That's usually the answer. Moderators didn't touch it.

Would you please review the site guidelines and follow them in the future? They ask you to email hn@ycombinator.com with questions like this, not post off-topic submissions like this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html