You seem to be mistaken about what's been happening. Moderators haven't been flagging those articles; users have. That's what '[flagged]' means.
The different outcome in this case is because of community response. There are still a lot of flags, but there are many more upvotes. That, plus the discussion quality (i.e. not a trainwreck) surprised us quite a bit. I emailed Cadran this morning that she should probably expect the post to get flagged the same way as others (by users) and that we wouldn't be able to intervene if that happened. Instead, it went straight to #1. That's fine by me because the discussion has remained relatively civil and substantive.
For completeness I should mention that we did do one intervention: we turned off a software penalty called the 'flamewar detector' that kicks in on discussions that get a great many comments. But that's routine: we always turn off that penalty when the discussion isn't actually a flamewar, and this one qualifies. Other than that, moderators haven't touched the post at all, so yeah I think it's fair to say no exceptions.
The different outcome in this case is because of community response. There are still a lot of flags, but there are many more upvotes. That, plus the discussion quality (i.e. not a trainwreck) surprised us quite a bit. I emailed Cadran this morning that she should probably expect the post to get flagged the same way as others (by users) and that we wouldn't be able to intervene if that happened. Instead, it went straight to #1. That's fine by me because the discussion has remained relatively civil and substantive.
For completeness I should mention that we did do one intervention: we turned off a software penalty called the 'flamewar detector' that kicks in on discussions that get a great many comments. But that's routine: we always turn off that penalty when the discussion isn't actually a flamewar, and this one qualifies. Other than that, moderators haven't touched the post at all, so yeah I think it's fair to say no exceptions.