Unfortunately, any thread about Microsoft quickly devolves into a flamewar. Similarly, any thread about politics, especially one that can be brigaded from other places, will quickly turn into a flamewar.
It's not that dang (et al) remove just because they want to, they remove because it becomes toxic. They stay up and in place long enough to know that.
edit: agree entirely that the case in the article (Bilal Abdul Kareem) is no gray area. The difficulties interleaving points about the generality of a topic and specific cases.
HN (and the tech community) has a libertarian streak, in addition to being somewhat left-of-center. Stories like this tend to unite these fundamentally opposing constituencies, resulting in more substantive discussions than other political topics. It also helps that the story is fundamentally non-partisan, in that both major US parties can be blamed for the situation.
I still consider it a blemish on HN's conscience, and a failure of HN leadership's responsibility to the community, that topics where this community is in a prime position to actually affect change tend to bring out the worst in (some) people and have in effect been banned to keep the peace. I'm not just speaking of "diversity in tech", where I can somewhat see how it has the potential of instilling fear in those traditionally profiting from discrimination. There, I can at least understand the mechanism at work, even though I consider it logically flawed.
But even summoning all my powers to understand opposing viewpoints I cannot fathom why this community reacts as dismissive as it does to, for example, stories (and projects / algorithms / ...) of algorithmic discrimination in machine learning. It would seem to be a topic that's both interesting from a technological and scientific standpoint, as well as welcome to everyone working in the space and presumably preferring not to do harm vs the opposite.
My best explanation is that there is a fundamental disgust in the tech community now of everything coming from, or even associated with, the social sciences. My second-best explanation is that tech has taken a sharp right turn at some point in the last 15 years, which would also explain why I remember only united opposition against software patents, and support for open source, from the first slashdot discussions I read. Whereas today, I see lots of sympathy for software patents in HN threats, and Open Source (and especially the GPL) are often spoken of with disgust.
edit: I'm 100% opposed to migrant family separation and think it's vile. I'm talking about how to reunite those families.
If your definition of "solving" this is "figuring out where we put these people's kids", simple pen and paper bookkeeping would have fixed that.
The separation of families is an intentionally punitive tactic and could be "solved" by not doing it in the first place.
I.e. first rule is to submit something interesting, the second is to avoid politics, but, apparently if the topic is interesting enough politics can be included.
The examples you list are the regular kind of political turmoil. This drone thing, given how far spread it is, on the other hand chips away at the fundamentals of why western societies managed to generate so much added value in the past centuries.
Consistent rule of law and functioning judicial system were one of them.
Having some black ops teams on ground violating basic human rights is not as bad as having an automated kill system that picks of targets based on metadata and then forwards that to drone targeting team as a daily standard policy.
To add to that, there is the generic humanistic cry for basic human rights.
After this auto-kill thing with the drones the ground on which to argument for any sort of generic human rights quickly becomes really fragile, getting all sorts of exceptions like, well, geneva convention was written when thinking about white people only and besides, the old school democratic process gave equal rights only if you were a male and ranked among the landed gentry or higher.
To be blunt: it appears as if brown people in far away countries still in 21st century are not considered as important as people of... other complexion... so it's ok to kill them every which way is more convenient.
edit: this seems off the front page, which answers my (not hypothetical or sarcastically intended) question.