I don’t think there’s a conspiracy afoot. Lots of stuff gets flagged, and hot political topics quickly turn into absolute garbage threads, so I think there’s a lot of us who simply won’t upvote such things. I’d rather read about tech.
Tangential: is there a way to see all flagged posts?
Turn on "showdead" in your user settings and you see pretty much everything, unless the mods invoke some special power to totally delete a post. But things that go [dead] due to flagging or whatever will be visible to you.