I flagged this post and many others related to India since it seems to attract the level of discourse which doesn't really belong in HN. There's a camps of extremely pro and anti government views that both twist facts to suit their agenda.

Attracting polarized views doesn't mean the topic isn't appropriate. The discourse doesn't set the value of the topic.

Please don't post political, nationalistic, or ideological flamewar comments to HN. It's not what this site is for, regardless of which side people are battling for or how right they feel it is.

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

I get what you are saying, but this was a submission on political protests and the government's somewhat repressive measures against it - so it is hard to discuss it without politics .... perhaps this submission should have been removed in and not allowed to gain traction in the first place? Can I flag such such submissions that have a political undertone?

It's not a question of discussing it without politics, but discussing it without flamewar. That may not be easy, because people quickly get angry and attack each other, but it's definitely doable, and that's the bar that political discussions on HN need to clear.

The question of how to moderate politics on HN is a complex one because political stories are mixed: some are on-topic and some are off-topic. We can't exclude them all, but we can't include them all either. It depends on which stories contain significant new information and can support curious conversation. For more about this, see https://hn.algolia.com/?query=political%20overlap%20by:dang&.... Some good places to start are these threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396

Just sharing my perspective here - I noticed that US political posts are actually better moderated here than other non-US ones.

I highlight this because one of the difficulty I often face as a user on foreign social media networks is that the foreign mods are unfamiliar with our country's history (political or otherwise).

And so I find they often resort to the easier way of just removing the posts that have the most complaints, without realising that this is also one of the strategies used by the online troll army to suppress genuine criticism (all the "flagging" that you see for such posts are often online brigading by the troll army abusing the reporting tools).

In other words, the controversy is manufactured for something that isn't really controversial, and the mods are forced to step in because of the controversy and remove many of the posts, which is actully one of their goals. You unknowingly help them.

(Unfortunately, I cannot also offer a practical solution to this).

I looked at the comments by green accounts, and most are actually anti Indian government, rather than pro Indian government.

It's a normal discourse in an active democracy. Sometimes people power dominates, sometimes the government in power gets its way.

Make sure you have dead comments visible.

I do, I've had that on right from when I created this account.

We've had to ask you before not to do religious flamewar on HN. This is not cool. Nationalistic flamewar isn't cool either.

We ban accounts that do these things. Please don't do it again.

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

Speaking as a member of one of those minorities how about you leave us out of this one. We cool.

Almost all India threads that mention the Indian government and the ruling BJP have supporters jumping in to support their party. I assume this happens a little more when the parties are extreme right/left wing.

They arrive via whatsapp groups asking members for support and a link. Soon enough the targeted sites end up being downvote/upvote bot parties unless there is strong moderation.

The media in India is muzzled similarly unless you do propaganda. Individuals online are equally bullied, muzzled, and in some cases killed. The country has currently imprisoned a stand up comedian for jokes "he might" make because he is not of the right religion.

You're saying that people are creating brand new HN accounts to support the Indian government? I don't see that. I looked at all the comments by green accounts in this thread:

Pro Indian government: 1 comment, 1 account

Anti Indian government: 8 comments, 4 accounts

Unknown: 2 comments, 1 account

I am saying that this is the trend on all threads that are critical of the Indian government and calls out its propaganda. It's either that or down votes.

It is difficult to call out bad behavior by government.

True. It's quite telling that as soon as it was morning in India this post fell off the top page.

Downvotes require 500 karma. One cannot create a account and do it.

You won't get a reply. For presenting any evidence like that on /r/india you would be promptly get banned. These guys ruined /r/india it's now full of anti modi bhajan 24/7. The only reason I still stick with reddit is because of some technical subs like /r/programming. Now these people aren't leaving even hacker news.

The governemnt is making large scale detention centers though.

r/India is an anti-Modi partisan sub. The last I checked they were expecting Biden administration to interfere in India's internal matters. Not a surprise since we still have a good number of Mir jaffers and Jai chands in the country. The unfortunate thing is that's the first place where foreign redditors will go whenever they want to see something India related.

All that aside, it's still a good place to see some meltdowns.

> Genocides arent an internal matter anymore. Sensible world governments usually put pressure on deviant administrations elsewhere.

I am tired of seeing these prof-less posts of genocide (and Jio/Ambani) being posted in every India related thread on HN. If you claim that there is a genocide going on, then please post proofs of the genocide. If a genocide in the remotest region of China can have proofs, then surely the ones in India do too?