It's directly called out in the guidelines - I'm not entirely sure what you're curious about.

Right up there at the top:

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

"The JFK Assassination" as a discussion of politics would be immediately flagged. Your linked [1] search is almost entirely comments and not a topic of discussion, which you would've realized quickly had you clicked through any of the results.

That was just an example, and that is why I started saying that it will be interesting to study flagging of articles. I have been around HN since 2009 and the flagging has been increasing in the last year. Most probably because of international and national conflicts.

I browse new pretty frequently, I think what you're seeing is more nation state actors or just newbies flooding HN than any change in policy. The stuff getting flagged has always gotten flagged, there's just more of it. Any accusations of political bias feel pretty misguided unless you want to present some specific examples.

>A simpler solution would be to ban political news no matter where they came from, even if they are historical.

HN tried this once, like 8 years ago. Every single thread was overwhelmed with discussions about whether an article was "political" or not so people could get things memory holed when they didn't like or care for them.

It was a short and abortive experiment because it betrayed reality: Everything is political in some way. There is zero legitimate way to say something ISN'T political.

Dang went back to the status quo of "just pretend we don't talk politics here, and I will weigh the scales with a heavy hand when it is needed". As dang is only human, and HN is a site made by humans and filled with user submitted content, hopefully it isn't controversial to point out that all the rules are done based on the judgements of those humans, which is influenced by their personal beliefs, and are a "best attempt" system.

> Everything is political in some way.

No. If someone posts a link to code or an article that's strictly about code, nobody actually considers that political

For example, lobster.rs actually censors political content. People only try this "everything is political" argument when they want to proselytize

I haven't noticed this yet, but I was used to reddit which is a lot more obvious. Only recently there was the Biden Trump debate, I looked it up on reddit and figured I'd just read the comments and see what the highlights were. Apparently Trump made an ass of himself again. I scrolled for a while and didn't see a single Biden comment, I was surprised he made it to the end without anything happening worth mentioning. Oh, but it was Reddit, of course, I sort the comments by "controversial" and it's the same as the "best" comments but about Biden making an ass of himself. Shit website.