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.

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).

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".

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.