We occasionally turn off the flags on political/ideological stories when certain conditions are met, such as: (1) there aren't too many of them; (2) the story contains significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...); (3) there's some overlap with intellectual curiosity; (4) we think HN can maybe discuss it substantively; or last but not least, (5) the community is insisting on discussing it. The latter can show up in various ways, such as when the story keeps getting reposted (often from different URLs) or we get lots of emails about it.
Political or ideological opinion pieces rarely meet any of these conditions. That doesn't mean they're bad articles, but it does mean we would reserve the turning-off-flags move (which ought to be fairly rare) for articles that do.
Thank you for the explanation. As a long time community member, I have seen this principle and agree with it. I am asking how the principle applies to the 60 minutes story so that multiple articles were on the front page, despite all being flagged? This does not seem very relevant as the 60 minutes story was not even killed, but delayed to await additional investigation. Seems like it violates the numbers you mentioned 1), 3), and 4) and 5)?
