The fact that this submission was flagged until I vouched for it is also worrisome.

The majority of political posts, especially those that make it to the front page, are very quickly flagged. It feels much worse lately which makes sense considering the political climate in the US.

> It feels much worse lately which makes sense considering the political climate in the US.

This is the part that concerns me.

I'm deeply concerned about it too, but the moderation on this website is pretty hostile towards politics. Only expect major political news (and the debate seems to be what qualifies as major) to be tolerated.

I think in general this site avoids political news unless it's directly related to tech. While I agree the US politics is mad right now, it doesn't "gratify one's intellectual curiosity".

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

That isn't what is happening at all, our MAGA supporting members are brigading any story that puts the limited operation in a bad light.

I'd like to see your concrete evidence for that claim.

The alternate hypothesis is that regular members are flagging political articles because they're tired of the huge upswing in political articles since January 20.

How are you telling the difference between the two?

From hanging out on [new] and seeing what gets flagged and what doesn't.

Flagging is just a 100x powerful downvote button that is getting abused by folks that want to change the narrative. I don't know what the karma value is for flagging, but it should be raised and flags should come out of a leaky bucket.

> I'd like to see your concrete evidence for that claim.

Please with the language.

> > I'd like to see your concrete evidence for that claim.

> Please with the language.

What do you think is wrong with that language?

And, hanging out on [new] and seeing what gets flagged is not evidence for your claim. It gives you no evidence of who is flagging or why - it only shows you what is getting flagged. That doesn't tell you that MAGA people are doing it, or that they're doing it because it puts something in a bad light. That's just your assumption.

Some of us are just tired of politics here on HN. That doesn't make us MAGA. It doesn't make us Trump supporters. It doesn't mean we support this particular deportation. It just means we don't want to discuss it on HN.

I also see the comments on those posts trying to downplay and deflect. Other political posts make it through just fine. Anything mentioning Elron gets insta flagged. It is the same exact behavior we so with anything even remotely critical of Israel.

I didn't say you were MAGA, nor did I say that all people flagging are MAGA. I have flagged plenty of stories that were about to or already descended into a toxic mess.

These stories are getting flagged with zero comments, and when unflagged, go on to have interesting conversations.

Flagging is not a solution for seeing stories you are not interested in. Downvoting is.

You know full well that any evidence one is going to have is circumstantial. It is a coy way of saying, "you have no concrete evidence, shutup until you do".

Kind of. I was saying that "our MAGA supporting members are brigading any story that puts the limited operation in a bad light" is an accusation of bad faith by the downvoters. Such an accusation is in fact the kind of thing where you should shut up until you have evidence.

"Assume good faith" is part of the site guidelines, after all.

> Flagging is not a solution for seeing stories you are not interested in. Downvoting is.

For comments. For stories, flagging is all you can do.

Also note that I am not the downvoter of these stories. I just don't think that everyone who does can be lumped into your "MAGA supporting" category.

Not related to tech? Excuse me? I'm assuming you're aware of how many immigrants work in the tech industry, right? Two jobs go, I was on a team of 10 where only 2 of us were actual, natural born Americans. Not every team at the company was like that, but, still, there was definitely a large percentage of non-Americans in the engineering and product org, at least.

What's intellectually stimulating about a professor being deported? I'm not denying it's an issue, it needs to be voiced somewhere, but is a tech forum the place?

The rules:

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

An asteroid hitting the earth would be on the news, should we not cover that here? How about the administration gunning down explicitly non-tech workers? How about the moon turning into cheese?

The word "probably" is probably being ignored. It is a novel situation (which is also referenced in the rules) that the government is ignoring court orders, multiple court orders, and it is going to effect the vast majority of people on this forum, eventually.

An H1B Worker getting deported seems preeeetty relevant to tech for me. Unless we think Tech workers themselves are somehow superior to medicine professors and this could never ever happen to them.

I think it's an especially important thing for tech, because Silicon Valley and tech companies in general employ a lot of talent that would be affected by these efforts, whether it's H-1B or naturalized citizens.

Tech workers suddenly not wanting to work in the US or entrepreneurs avoiding conferences and such in the US as a result of an increasingly hostile environment is a great way to crater tech companies as a whole.

I agree, and an article on tech brain drain to Europe would be interesting! But the worst thing for HN is that it becomes another Reddit, full of posts about US politics and comments about political views with no substance.

The site rules explicitly say news articles are not things we should post.

I was an immigrant in the US (J-2) and agree this is an issue, just not one for HN.

Even stories point out flaws of no-lidar approach with particular brand of cars are being flagged. Is that no tech related?

Any examples? I'd agree that is bad, yes - except if it's excessively shared and Dang is linking to the main conversation.

She’s an H1B holder. That is very much of importance to the tech industry (at least in the US)

There are protests actually from looking at twitter. It's just that it doesn't make the news.

It's hard to tell, it doesn't look as massive as say the women's march.

What even is "the news" anymore?

A majority, yes seriously a majority, of people under the age of 40 get their "news" from TikTok and social media.

"It doesn't make the news" is kind of meaningless nowadays.

Maybe "It doesn't get promoted by the algorithms" then?

Given the ideological bent of people in favor of these actions, they will bend over backwards to invent a justification that makes this acceptable. CBP and ICE are both feeling fully empowered enough that they can just ignore court orders and not bother following the rule of law which should be considered a critical problem (especially by the people that were supposed to be 'I need guns to protect myself from the government' types) but I think it's increasingly clear the double think on brazen display.

Yeah - just wait until they start deporting actual Americans to Lebanon!

You may be joking, but ICE is already detaining naturalized US citizens: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/us-citizen-hispanic-deta...

That article is more outrage porn than anything else.

That doesn't sound like a denial that it's actually happening.

If you can’t see the difference between deporting someone and stopping them to see if they are the person to be deported what can I tell you.

If you are traffic stopped by a law enforcement officer for any reason you are “detained”. So in that sense US citizens are detained all the time. Nothing new here about that. They apparently detained him because someone missed a court appearance who has used his address. That might be a more aggressive application of investigation than the prior administration’s policy for handling people that miss their immigration court cases, but it’s not inappropriate for a LEO to show up at your door if you miss a court case in general regardless of your immigration status.

“Machado said he was uncuffed and immediately released after showing his driver’s license.”

Seems like they treated him appropriately as soon as they verified his identity.

'Silence is complicity' as the Americans like to point out.

Why water down what they actually say? They say "silence is violence", and they ALSO say that speech is violence!

Yes, and he was 100% legal. Only proves recism is alive and well in the US