It's a good question, in that it brings out the fundamental issue with these discussions.
> Why not automatically punish users that abuse flagging to censor stories
The problem is with the words "abuse" and "censor". No one can agree on what they mean because it depends on what you think of the underlying story, and when it comes to divisive topics, people have strongly differing views on that.
When the topics aren't so divisive (e.g. Conway's Game of Life on the GPU, or something like that), this is not such a thorny problem. But those aren't the cases that we're talking about in this thread.
> Why not automatically punish users that abuse flagging to censor stories
The problem is with the words "abuse" and "censor". No one can agree on what they mean because it depends on what you think of the underlying story, and when it comes to divisive topics, people have strongly differing views on that.
When the topics aren't so divisive (e.g. Conway's Game of Life on the GPU, or something like that), this is not such a thorny problem. But those aren't the cases that we're talking about in this thread.