It implicitly paints the administration, and thus Elon Musk, and thus Silicon Valley bigwigs, in a bad light. Very many of the users of this site will flag anything which does so, under the guise of politics being not of interest to hackers, even as many other users of this site express interest in such conversations. (Even for me to honestly mention this phenomenon is technically against the rules, though.)

How do you know why anyone (except yourself) flags stuff?

I'm not the same person as above, but I feel the same sentiment. There's no hard data, but the pattern of behavior is far too consistent for me to write it off. Plenty of political articles that make it through, but specifically the ones that paint the current US admin as being wrong (even implicitly, by covering their more extreme actions) seem to often accrue a lot of points, shoot up to the front page, and then get flagged - while lots of other political stuff passes through.

It also just lines up with what I observed in HN users before that - the average user seems to be far more likely to be a richer, older, American conservative than any random user on the English internet or even other tech spaces.

You must use the "vouch" feature if you disagree with flaggers

At what level do you gain article vouch privileges?

I think it’s 500 karma and it will only when the article is dead.

You can only vouch [dead] things. The typical progression for these flagged posts is: in good standing -> flagged to [flagged][dead] -> vouched back into good standing -> flagged to [flagged]. The final state requires moderator intervention to unflag.