Many of us (including me) find this matter interesting, but HN is designed to allow a tiny minority to flag content. Whether that's wise or not is another topic. It's always been HN's design.
You can't do much about other commenters, even if they are professional trolls paid by the post. Nonetheless, political matters (which this arguably is) are considered by many to be off-topic. That's why you're getting squelched.
There were plenty of active commenters, most of them considering this a very serious issue.
And no one has been able to offer any explanation why my comment is permanently collapsed even when opened on a different browser, despite no obvious flag and a healthy amount of positive votes.
Finally, as I've said elsewhere here, there appears to be evidence of "silent de-ranking" where stories like the one about Google's censorship are not flagged in any way but won't show up on the front pages.
As a community HN deserves better, by far. Normalising this behaviour will lead to dark and bad places.
Many of us (including me) find this matter interesting, but HN is designed to allow a tiny minority to flag content. Whether that's wise or not is another topic. It's always been HN's design.
You can't do much about other commenters, even if they are professional trolls paid by the post. Nonetheless, political matters (which this arguably is) are considered by many to be off-topic. That's why you're getting squelched.