Open letter accuses BBC board member of having a conflict of interest on Gaza

Watch how quickly this disappears from the front page despite getting the most upvotes.

I don’t disagree, but it does seem to fit squarely in a culture war (and or) political topic.

flamebait gets removed all the time because there's no way there's going to be a productive, illuminating, curious conversation about it. doesn't mean there's a conspiracy to prevent discussion.

How is this flamebait? Is there another way to report on this topic that would be less inflammatory? Or should media manipulation by foreign governments simply not be discussed and we should just keep quiet less someone get upset?

Surely if Russia was manipulating BBC reporting it would be note-worthy as well no?

I think parent just means that it’s a divisive topic, which means on the internet, that inherently makes it flamebait (and not necessarily through any fault of the reporting).

Even on HN (and sometimes, especially on HN).

There are some divisive topics that are less prone to flame wars on HN vs. other discussion platforms, but those are fairly limited, and often not political (in my experience).

I mean I almost flagged it: the headline absolutely does not match the letter, and it’s clickbait by a well-known polemicist. Israel’s continued actions in the West Bank are somewhere between apartheid and ethnic-cleansing, the civilian deaths in Gaza are beyond appalling, and there are genocidal maniacs in their current cabinet, but this article is trash.

Iran isn't an ally of any country in the west. The west says "Iran is an awful, oppressive country" basically daily. What's new to report there? They're already economically cut off from most of the world. There's not much else for us to do.

Israel is an ally of every country in the west. People say "stop criticizing them because you can't do that until you complain about every other problem on earth first!" and it's a very strange, conditioned behavior not seen when problems pertaining to any other country are brought up. And the big difference between Iran and Israel: Israel isn't cut off from the world economically, and in some places (many US states), boycotting them is even illegal.

None of my tax dollars or purchases fund the Iranian government. Lots of our money funds Israel against our will. That's why people get angry.

Curious why you think I would find that an exception? I most certainly would also want reporting on that.

Most of the west is definitely not Israel's ally based on their lack of support.

The US does support Israel but this is a story about the UK. The UK does not support Israel and even partially boycotts Israel at the moment.

If you're American then your tax money e.g. funds Egypt. Egypt is a dictatorship, no human rights, involved in the Sudan civil war where millions are dying. Not a beep on Hacker News.

EDIT: Not to mention the billions of dollars, including indirectly to Hamas, coming from the west.

The problem with this logic is that it is very, very easy for even a small number of people interested in silencing a topic on any issue they're concerned about "divisive" just by intentionally flooding the comments with knowingly inflammatory responses.

This has already be used on HN to essentially silence any serious reporting on climate change. Anyone technical with an interest in data will find most climate change related studies interesting, but a small minority of people who are fearful of the consequences will make sure to create an issue and shut down conversation, organically getting posts "flagged".

The Prime Minister of the UK recently said he supported Israel's attacks on Iran. The UK even helps arm Israel. [1] Not sure what the basis of your claims are but they're quite different from reality.

And I apologize in advance to any Egyptian readers out there, but Egypt has a very low reputation these days. I've not once seen a positive comment about the country in these past 10 years. Nobody is flooding in to defend Egypt when their problems are brought up and saying "Before you criticize Egypt, what about..."

And if you hold your country to the standards of, as you said, oppressive dictatorships that support brutal wars, that's a low standard and will attract criticism.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/07/uk-sent-isra...

Iran is not the Palestinians. Iran supplies Russia and the UK considers it a threat but it is not acting in any way as an "ally" to Israel here.

"UK defends partial Israel arm sales ban"

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2np2l5mlko

Partial arms sales ban is not an ally in my book. Many countries sell arms to other countries they are not even close to being allied with.

EDIT: Also count for me how many anti-Egypt stories made HN front page over the last 2 (or 10) years and how many anti-Israel stories made it.

> I've not once seen a positive comment about the country in these past 10 years.

We are not talking about positive comments (even though I'm sure we've seen some) we're talking about Israel being singled out for attack and being denied the right to defend itself against Hamas.

I feel like it’s wrong to call this topic divisive. It doesn’t adequately address that one side of the divide seems to consistently advocate for condoning genocide in broad daylight.

I don’t disagree. I’m just afraid it’s a hard problem to solve, at least an automated one.

At one point, I proposed a read-only option for (well-reported) divisive articles to help raise awareness without resulting in flame wars.

But there are downsides to that, too — either they can still get flagged away, there’s a risk of garbage remaining on the FP if you disable the flag feature, and/or HN gets accused of bias if they manipulate certain articles this way (by disabling flags and/or commenting).

I’m not necessarily saying it is or isn’t.

But I think, by definition, if an article draws a lot of flagged/downvoted comments (as this one has), it’s hard to argue that it’s not divisive, at least to this audience.

Yeah. I won’t argue with the label. Just feel like we ought to have a better label for topics of this kind.

This rhetoric is delusional. If you’re a real person arguing in good faith, I beg you to stop pretending that American politics is a two-team sport. This is not a tactic worth employing.

It’s gone.

A sales ban would simply be in compliance with international law, and the UK is a member of the ICC, so even a partial ban is failing to live up to their obligations. The US is not currently a signatory but it's own laws make it illegal to export arms to Israel, so I guess we're "more" of an ally, as we're willing to more flagrantly break the rules in this regard, but the UK is still pretty far in favor of Israel with their current stance.

It's not some theoretical 'divisive', you can read how these threads go yourself, including this one. The meta discussions also make these a lot worse so it's hard to blame this on some 'small number' of people.

A lot of the flagged posts look completely fine, to me. Basically the entire discussion is greyed out, which suggests a pretty intense unwillingness to talk about the subject on principles alone.

I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides. If every HN thread resorted to this logic, nobody would want to use the site.

>I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides."

The brinksmanship card of HN is the reverse of this framing: There must be level-headed discussion. To wit:

>The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

It's gone. I found this article in the Hacker News Digest

It's better to link the things you want to use as examples because otherwise we aren't really talking about anything concrete. The thread on this submission is awful, for instance - so that's my first link.

I think the flag system in HN is unnecessary and prone to abuse in threads like these.

Some comments that clearly break the rules should be removed by the community. But that should take multiple downvotes.

The flagging just allows one or two people to remove a part of the discussion, and we rely on other users to view dead or flagged comments to “rescue” them

not sure which side you mean. gaza and israel have had officials advocate for the destruction of the other. that's kinda what makes it an existential total war.