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Comment by thereare5lights | Hacker News Reader

I suspect there is a strain of anti-Chinese sentiments here. When you see articles relating to black social issues, they immediately get flagged, but articles like these always get through.

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There's no way for HN to be immune from macro trends. The macro trend right now, unfortunately, is polarization between China and the West. As I'm sure you've noticed, this has been manifesting dramatically in Western media over the past months. Since the audience here is mostly Western (50% US, 30% Europe, 7% Canada plus Australia, IIRC), it's inevitably going to identify more with one side than the other.

We moderate HN to mitigate the worst aspects of this, but there's no hope of eliminating it. HN is controlled by its community. All that moderation can do is adjust the margins.

You can absolutely eliminate it, you just don't want to because it would cost too much.

I suppose macro trends would also explain why black social issues always get flagged on HN as well.

Eliminate a Western audience looking at things from a Western perspective? That is an excessive idea of what moderators can do. We are janitors.

You can do something so that black social issues links do not get removed.

Plenty of such articles have been discussed here, and we've often turned off flags on the more substantive ones. It really depends on the specific article and how well it fits the mandate of this site. Not all social-issue articles do.

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