Admins can, and do, prune entire branches of comments off of posts.
These two methods would take a bit more work than just banishing the topic entirely, but with topics like the first time that "AI" kill lists are publicized, maybe exceptions should be made.
For a high quality piece of tech-related investigative journalism like this, flagging is simply censorship.
Considering what regularly doesn't get flagged on this site related to AI, conflict, etc., this topic seems to fit in.
I guess all you have to do, if you want to suppress information about something, is to ensure that its comments always devolve into unproductive discussions. Funny, I once read about this as a tactic for controlling information flow in online communities...
im not sure what other tools exist other than a block button like X
I wish people would let people decide for themselves what is productive or not...
Like I said, I don't agree with this particular topic getting flagged (I saw it go back and forth numerous times), but I also would push back hard on any allegations of "censorship". There are plenty of completely open forums online anyone can access with a click, and HN is most decidedly not that, by design, since the beginning of the site.
FWIW, I found this to be a really interesting story that I didn't previously know about, so I hope it stays up, and this is a story I'd be willing to vouch for.