I've been commenting as openly as I possibly can on this for years now. The issue isn't that we're hiding the truth (as far as we know what it is) from anyone. The issue is that people's perceptions are so conditioned by their passions that it doesn't matter much what the truth actually is. Many people on both sides of this issue perceive every post they agree with as being flagged and removed, and every post they disagree with as being upvoted to the top every time. That's not an exaggeration. As I said to someone yesterday: if evidence were needed here, they could just look at HN itself.

It's wrong to say this hasn't come up about any other country than China. Before the China wave, there was the Russia wave, and passionate users were saying things like: "YCombinator is in the Kremlin's pocket. Wow. I fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion. But wow." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631095) and "Russian money might be making this very site possible" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15630920). These perceptions were just as wrong, and by just the same mechanism.

Blaming this one on the content of the material posted misses the forest for the trees, and denies your responsibility to post content of sufficient quality. Newsworthy is not sufficient if it’s filled with outrage and has a clickbait headline.

I flagged it, because I considered the linked headline and writeup to be of excessively poor construction and quality. The material itself was interesting once I grasped it behind the layers of distraction and outrage-rabblerousing, but I can’t endorse that presentation style here and so I absolutely flagged it.

If you had written up a blog post about this event, linked to supporting material such as the Reddit post, and offered some background on why this is new and terrifying — then I might have upvoted it instead of flagging it.