If you have been a regular HN reader, you should be already be familiar with the guidelines on submissions at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

So it shouldn't be surprising that these stories are being flagged for being off topic.

One thing to remember is that there’s a multibillion dollar industry trying to drum up outrage for political reasons or, in the case of social media, ad impressions. Much of that is bad faith repetitions of old talking points and I think a lot of people who’ve been here for a while know that it’s unlikely to have anything insightful but will generate plenty of rancor.

I think there is room to discuss these topics but it has to be carefully set up not to look like that: not just a link to partisan media, showing some original thought and research, and not bashing one camp as a hook. On that last point I’m not just talking about “$name owns the libs” stuff but also things like the genre which was popular a decade or so back where someone would write a book about how an entire field could transformed by an Econ 101 exercise, inevitably showing no awareness of all of the hard problems in that field which real experts have been wrestling with for decades and often relying on anecdotes, unreplicated studies, or massive extrapolations (e.g. Freakonomics, “nudge theory”, etc.).

I'd rather see such posts flagged. There are plenty of places online to argue about the culture war, let us have some place we can get away from the division and just talk about tech

> Is there anything we can do to maintain calm open discourse about nuanced and emotional topics on HN?

tl;dr: no

That's just the state of internet discourse in general these days.