Strange how I only ever see this happening to topics that paint the social justice brigade in a particularly bad light, a group that has a particularly censorio

Strange how I only ever see this happening to topics that paint the social justice brigade in a particularly bad light, a group that has a particularly censorious bent to boot. Either way, every time I've seen it happen, the thread is young and still rising, so this flagging mechanism cannot possibly represent a meaningful slice of the HN readership, who are prevented from finding out. That sounds like plain old censorship and information control to me, and I'm pretty sure the moderators know it.