Yes, the criterion is the one the site guidelines state: using Hacker News "primarily for political or ideological battle". For more on what that means and why it's worded that way, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185062.

In practice there's a huge gap between users who come to HN to gratify intellectual curiosity, who in the course of being interested in a bunch of things occasionally comment on a political topic, versus accounts that only are interested in divisive flammable issues and use HN to prosecute their views on them.