It's very hard to run a news site and keep stuff out that actually interest people.
I very much doubt that these articles are upvoted by employees, etc.
But this post in particular is suspect because it is totally devoid of content. Look at the comments so far, the most discussion has been prompted by the lack of content resulting in wondering how on earth this got to the top so quickly.
I'd bet dollars to donuts there was coordinated voting by Microsoft employees. Lots of companies do it on reddit, it's much less common here at HN (I think), but it still does happen.
What makes you say this is the only community on HN? I personally wouldn't say there's one specific community HN caters to beyond "technology people". There's all sorts of topics posted daily on here, and only a select few cater to web devs. Honestly, if it's something done by one of the big companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc), it'll most likely get on HN because there is no one particular focus.
HN has pretty advanced code to handle cases like what MS is being accused of right now, and none of it's been triggered (or this story would've gone up the front page then fallen back down).
