The guidelines for Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) state that they don't want "political" topics posted here, and prefer topics that "good hackers find interesting" and that foster constructive discourse.
These topics do tend to create a lot of low-signal posts and I think there's a certain contingent of HN users who flag for that reason. I think there are also a contingent of users who flag these topics because they are, to put it bluntly, trying to censor them for ideological reasons.
The latter group is beyond help. The former I think would do well to wake up to the state of the world and use the considerable reach of HN to wake others up.
"Good hackers" will be having considerably less interesting conversations under an authoritarian regime, and by that point it'll be too late.