Comment by tomhow
> and that Americans get indignant when it gets flagged
It's not exclusively (or mostly) U.S.A. residents who complain about contemporary politics topics getting flagged. We see plenty of complaints from Europe and elsewhere.
We've long accepted that there is a large overlap between politics and technology. The Snowden leaks in 2013 were huge on HN, as were several other Wikileaks releases well before that.
HN has never been a politics-free zone. It’s just subject to the same standard as everything else on HN: there has to be some “significant new information” to the story.
I think that the current guidelines are very reasonable. Some news are relevant to hackers and foster the sort of discussions that make this website so great.
Others are just regular politics.