I (and others) were arguing that the Trump administration is probably, and unfortunately, the most relevant topic to the tech industry on most any given day. This is because computer is mostly made out of people. The message that these political stories intersect deeply with technology (as is seen here) seems to have successfully gotten through.
I wish the most relevant tech story of every day were, say, some cool new operating system, or something cool and curiosity-inspiring like "you can sort in linear time" or "python is an operating system" or "i made X rewritten in Y" or whatever.
I think in most things, creation is much harder than destruction, but software and software systems are an exception where one individual can generally do more creation than destruction. So, it's particularly interesting (and jarring) when a few individuals are able to make decisions that cause widespread destruction.
We should collectively be proud that we have a culture where creation is easier than destruction. But it's also why the top stories of any given day will be "Trump did X" or "us-east-1 / cloudflare / crowdstrike is down" or "software widely used in {phones / servers} has a big scary backdoor".
"Major Silicon Valley Company's Product Creates and Publishes Child Porn" has nothing to do with politics. It's not "political content." It is relevant tech news when someone investigates and points out wrongdoing that tech companies are up to. If another tech company's product was doing this, it would be all over HN and there would be pretty much no flagging.
When these stories get flagged, it's because people don't want bad news to get out about the company--it's not about avoiding politics out of principle.
I'm not saying you're wrong about it being brigaded by PR bots, I'm saying it's still political. Hell, everything's political.
In 2020, Dang said [1]
> Voting ring detection has been one of HN's priorities for over 12 years: [...]
> I've personally spent hundreds of hours working on this, as well as tracking down voting rings of every imaginable sort. I'd never claim that our software catches everything, but I can tell you that it catches so much that I often go through the lists to find examples of good projects that people were trying ineptly to promote, and invite them to do it again in a way that is more likely to gain community interest.
Of course this sort of thing is inherently heuristic; presumably bots throw up a smokescreen of benign activity, and sophisticated bots could present a very realistic, human-like smokescreen.
There are all sorts of approaches that a moderation team could take if they actually believed this was a problem. For example, identify the users who regularly downvote/flag stories like this that end up being cleared by the moderation team for unflagging or the 2nd chance queue and devalue their downvotes/flags in the future.
I think the biggest thing HN could do to stop this problem is to not make flagging affect an article's ranking until after a human mod reviews the flags and determines them to be appropriate. Right now, all bad actors apparently have to do is be quick on the draw, and get their flagging ring in action ASAP. I'm sure any company's PR team (or motivated Elon worshiper) can buy "100 HN flags on an article" on the dark web right now if they wanted to.
This just describes HN as a whole, so if this is the concern, might as well shut the site down.
Now that you mention it - I've noticed the same on Youtube ... I used to get suspended every 5 minutes on there.
I understand why you gave the general answer you gave rather than addressing this specific example, but I'll just say this story would be a good place to look for those potential "agenda-motivated" flaggers.