I also felt more comfortable with yahoo.com than with a politicized site like NR. The intention here is simply to be accurate and neutral to the extent possible.
But it's the same article, so it doesn't make sense to pretend that it comes from a different source, besides which the HN guidelines say "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If there's a more neutral and accurate article we can change it again.
I understand the moderation decisions made today, but I'm alienated by them.
A political article like this one would ordinarily get flagged off the HN front page. The subject matter of Twitter and Facebook imposing constraints on distribution is germane, but this article goes way beyond that by propagating the suspect email content.
Obviously HN readers are going to want to see the emails and decide for themselves. There's zero implication of authenticity (or inauthenticity for that matter). The only thing we care about at our end is having an accurate article (and headline) for the story.
Politics isn't completely off-topic for HN—there's overlap and it depends. There's lots of previous explanation about that at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., and if anyone has a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.
We turn off user flags sometimes when a story contains interesting (in HN's sense) new information and the probability of a substantive discussion clears a certain threshold.
It goes much before that. Isikoff met Steele on Sept 22, 2016, and published a story about Carter Page the next day. He didn’t verify a thing. All he did was get an anon government official to say FBI had the dossier. And that kind of journalism happens all the time and never gets called out. The double standards are amazing.
It's hard to find a non-right-wing source promoting extraordinary right-wing campaign claims that are not accompanied by evidence or a credible background story.
The story from an HN point of view is not the campaign claim—that would probably be off topic—but the actions taken by Twitter and Facebook, which are significant new information [1] about an interesting new phenomenon [2].
