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Comment by meiraleal | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the moderation work and the patience to explain your perspective in this matter although I continue to think that HN is biased in this and other cases - if more users flag any comment related to the Palestine perspective but not as many flag the comments calling Palestinians terrorists the moderation work becomes a backchannel for that cause by design.

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That's an ongoing issue on a lot of topics. We're willing to, and sometimes do, turn off flags when it feels like an article can provide a basis for a substantive discussion and (<-- note that 'and') the topic has had relatively little coverage on HN lately. When it comes to Israel/Gaza, we've done that several times so far:

Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38745673 - Dec 2023 (751 comments)

'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 - Dec 2023 (1308 comments)

The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1675 comments)

I'm open to others. Possibly there will be a good article about the ICJ hearing tomorrow.

I hope you find some others because so far it's been 2 articles with claims that Jews control the media, and 1 article from an unreliable source.

(The unreliable source has lines saying, for example, that Israel beat Palestinians for not understanding Hebrew which is extraordinarily unlikely - Israel has plenty of Arab speakers. That newspaper is simply not a reliable source, and it should never have been allowed to become a post on HN.)

> The unreliable source has lines saying, for example, that Israel beat Palestinians for not understanding Hebrew

Israel calls 10 years kids terrorists, jail and kill them. Are you really saying that it is extraordinarily unlikely that some soldiers beat those kids because they couldn't understand Hebrew? There are many humor sketches coming from Israel making fun of palestinians in an horrendous way. Beating kids for not understanding hebrew is almost nothing compared with what we have videos of israeli soldiers doing and saying.

The Israeli extremist right-wing and its supporters and lobby groups aren't "the Jews".

Would you deny that, say, the Russian or US government are messing with social media, or media in general? Does that mean they "control" the media? Of course not.

In my experience HN does have biases, but many of them can be very dependent on time of day, topic or article. Sometimes you'll see one bias in a new thread but by the end of the day it will have reversed.

"Backchannel" means something different from the way you are using it here.

My understanding of 'backchannel' in this context is that when a comment or post provokes a certain group within this forum, they have a method to influence the moderation. This is done through the backchannel by flagging the comment and then guiding people on appropriate or inappropriate behavior beyond the main discussion.

Isn't this flagged thread a backchannel?

Voting isn't an alternative method, it's a primary signal.

I think backchannel has a pretty clear definition.

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