Some very technical people were requested to delete a historically important dataset. We, the hackers, are the ones people ask to make things like this actually happen.

rbanffy gave two of the reasons (historical importance and obedience or lack thereof by technical employees).

My other reason is that the article reminded me of earlier discussions on Hacker News about actual and perceived government censorship (especially wrt Twitter), mass propaganda (fear of which was a motivator of the TikTok ban), and (actual and alleged) large-scale crimes (riots, drug trade from the US southern border, and illegal immigration).

I also had a not-really-a-reason, an impression and assumption that Hacker News tends to be sensitive to revisionism of history and truth in real contexts (communist China) and fictional ones (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Hackers are removing digitized evidence of a crime. This board should not care whether they’re the authorities or part of a counterculture.