There is also the (male) French professor's story who attempted to enter US for a conference and was sent back because they searched his phone and found some criticism to trump's policies, not sure how close to the frontpage it made it but it is currently flagged [0]. I think one problem is that there are too many stories on more or less the same topic, but each of them has a bit different angle.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43418059

Even this current thread seems to have gotten demoted out of front page.

Clearly we are all just supposed to keep our heads down, be quiet, and work on LLMs for VC to get rich off of.

It's not any political story -- the site is definitely biased against certain kinds of political stories.

People voraciously upvote and argue about California zoning laws or San Francisco drug policy here and the moderation staff encourages this. Or AI policies from the US federal government or the DMA from the EU. Or the SLS rocket.

'political' is just used as a euphemism for 'taboo' and there are many unspoken taboos about what is talked and not talked about here.

I think the most likely case is users are less likely to flag those stories. Or, they're less likely to generate discussion that causes those stories to get flagged.

When I use the term 'the site' I mean both the owners, moderators and users as a collective whole.

There's a sort of unspoken symbiosis going on between the users who consistently flag certain kinds of stories for ideological purposes and the owners/moderators who are content to let them do that.