Clearly other HN readers consider news of as many as 12,000 people possibly having been killed by their government to be important, and consider the discussion happening about it on this page to be interesting to them.

The criticism was not the news itself but this particular source compared to other available sources of the same news.

It is a shame they are indifferent to the degree of AI slop ('Then came the order. Not a shutdown-- something worse. The routers didn't go silent. They screamed. Filtering rules conflicted. Routes flapped. The network began eating itself alive.') as it neither lends credibility to the source nor respects the humanity of the story's subjects. It would be far better were other HN readers more discerning.

That 12,000 number is utter make believe - an X account (you can guess who backs it) make this claim, got boosted and got over 1M views... and then they deleted the post. But the damage is done, of course.

Even sources in the Iranian security forces say 2000, which is nothing to scoff at.

The 12,000 number comes from Iran International's Editorial Board, not some random twitter user:

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601130145

Absolutely all your comments are shilling for Iranian dictatorship. Are you paid by Iran? Sorry I have a bad news for you, you will probably never receive the next paycheck since IRCG and terrorist mullahs regime is probably falling in the next weeks

Posted by a single-purpose account no less.

It has pretty graphics.

Yeah, and heavily rewritten by AI. Every single sentence screams AI slop smell. I find that short content smells the most - AI tends to overfit its patterns even more strongly then.

“Not a shutdown—something worse. The routers didn't go silent. They screamed.”

“This wasn't a cascade—it was coordinated demolition.”

puking noises

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that and got yucked by it. I was genuinely looking for a contact email on the webpage to complain to them about it. Such pretty visualization of data to then have LLM garbage explain it.

I’m learning there’s a significant portion of the population that is completely unbothered and unnoticing of AI slop smell. Some days I wish I could ignore or tolerate it too, given how prevalent it has become so quickly - but it repulses me too much.