Agreed. This is selective censorship by the HN moderators (which is fine, as it's clearly up to them as to what's deemed important here, but the rules for being flagged need to be more clear in this manner then).
Edit: So "TV news" covering the newest iPhone release would probably be off-topic too then based on this reasoning, but this seems to reliably hit the front page of HN everytime Apple does so. Apologies for the bad example.
Consider that HN is all about intellectual curiosity. Imagine that the hostname is intellectualcuriosity.ycombinator.com rather than news. Debating product design is more likely to yield interesting thoughts/comments and much less likely to lead to a useless flame war.
The newsworthiness of a submission - which is huge in this case, as you noted - is a relatively minor factor for whether something is a good fit.
That's worse. Political issues as at least typically have different perspectives to discuss, people-facts do not. This doesn't need to be on the front page.
The guidelines probably needs to be changed here then.
Boris Johnson's bout with COVID-19 didn't make the HN front page despite being headline news elsewhere. Why would this be different?
If you work at Twitter you might want to get to work and stop this state sanctioned attack on his account.
