Surely if Russia was manipulating BBC reporting it would be note-worthy as well no?
Even on HN (and sometimes, especially on HN).
There are some divisive topics that are less prone to flame wars on HN vs. other discussion platforms, but those are fairly limited, and often not political (in my experience).
This has already be used on HN to essentially silence any serious reporting on climate change. Anyone technical with an interest in data will find most climate change related studies interesting, but a small minority of people who are fearful of the consequences will make sure to create an issue and shut down conversation, organically getting posts "flagged".
At one point, I proposed a read-only option for (well-reported) divisive articles to help raise awareness without resulting in flame wars.
But there are downsides to that, too — either they can still get flagged away, there’s a risk of garbage remaining on the FP if you disable the flag feature, and/or HN gets accused of bias if they manipulate certain articles this way (by disabling flags and/or commenting).
But I think, by definition, if an article draws a lot of flagged/downvoted comments (as this one has), it’s hard to argue that it’s not divisive, at least to this audience.
Israel is an ally of every country in the west. People say "stop criticizing them because you can't do that until you complain about every other problem on earth first!" and it's a very strange, conditioned behavior not seen when problems pertaining to any other country are brought up. And the big difference between Iran and Israel: Israel isn't cut off from the world economically, and in some places (many US states), boycotting them is even illegal.
None of my tax dollars or purchases fund the Iranian government. Lots of our money funds Israel against our will. That's why people get angry.
The US does support Israel but this is a story about the UK. The UK does not support Israel and even partially boycotts Israel at the moment.
If you're American then your tax money e.g. funds Egypt. Egypt is a dictatorship, no human rights, involved in the Sudan civil war where millions are dying. Not a beep on Hacker News.
EDIT: Not to mention the billions of dollars, including indirectly to Hamas, coming from the west.
And I apologize in advance to any Egyptian readers out there, but Egypt has a very low reputation these days. I've not once seen a positive comment about the country in these past 10 years. Nobody is flooding in to defend Egypt when their problems are brought up and saying "Before you criticize Egypt, what about..."
And if you hold your country to the standards of, as you said, oppressive dictatorships that support brutal wars, that's a low standard and will attract criticism.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/07/uk-sent-isra...
"UK defends partial Israel arm sales ban"
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2np2l5mlko
Partial arms sales ban is not an ally in my book. Many countries sell arms to other countries they are not even close to being allied with.
EDIT: Also count for me how many anti-Egypt stories made HN front page over the last 2 (or 10) years and how many anti-Israel stories made it.
> I've not once seen a positive comment about the country in these past 10 years.
We are not talking about positive comments (even though I'm sure we've seen some) we're talking about Israel being singled out for attack and being denied the right to defend itself against Hamas.