Hacker News Censors Clinton Email Server Stories, Despite Mass User Interest

Hillary Clinton answers questions from reporters March 10, 2015 at the United Nations in N
DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images

Y Combinator’s Hacker News appears to be censoring all mention of the FBI’s decision not to recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, for her use of a private email server, despite tremendous user interest in the story.

Hacker News works in a similar way to Reddit, where users can upvote certain linked news stories in order to create an up-to-date homepage of recent technology news. However, despite a large amount of upvotes on stories surrounding Clinton and the FBI, the website appears to be going out of its way to erase all mention of the story.

As of writing, the story with the most amount of upvotes on Hacker News’ homepage has 413 points. The story with the least amount of points has 20.

A link to the FBI’s statement on Clinton’s email server received 185 points, yet it is nowhere to be seen on the homepage, seemingly hidden as it gained momentum. Other links that appear to be hidden include a New York Times story on the FBI’s statement, which received 46 points, and a Sky story which received 43 points. None of these stories currently appear on the Hacker News homepage.

“This story is getting flagged off the front page over and over. Clearly there’s a segment that doesn’t want to see this news or discussion of it,” commented one user. “Definitely HN news worthy regardless of political leaning,” added another.

“As a regular user of HackerNews over the past few years I would have bet serious money that this would have been the top story on the site,” said one user in an email to Breitbart Tech. “Today I’ve found nothing unless I explicitly look for it. Even then it isn’t easy.”

One story from the Guardian with 65 points was even successfully left flagged, a status that is usually reserved for stories completely off topic, or against the site’s rules. When several users started complaining about the flagged status, a community moderator known as “dang” simply claimed that “It seems relevant to you and off-topic to others.”

Looking into the moderator’s previous comment history, his political leanings are apparent. The moderator can be seen telling off one user for calling Clinton a “shill” “without evidence,” whilst in another comment he can be seen punishing several users for criticizing Ramadan and how it affects tech workers on a story to do with “working through Ramadan.”

Like many modern tech companies, Y Combinator and Hacker News appear to have a political agenda, and with a company whose president wrote a public letter comparing Republican candidate Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, I think it’s rather obvious as to what agenda that is.

Breitbart Tech has reached out for comment to Y Combinator.

Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech and former editor of the Squid Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.

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