Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices

Is there anyone else who doesn't support either side of this conflict? They've been fighting each other for over 100 years. They both want the same piece of land. It's on them to figure it out. People around the world don't need to 'pick a side'. We can protest for both sides to sort their shit out, and not drag the rest of us into it.

I've recently visited my parents in europe. I have no affiliations with Israel or Jews. My parents watched a local Al-Jazeera channel in their mother tongue since Qatar seems to strategically deploy satellite offices of Al-Jazeera in different countries, even european. Boy was i shocked at the level of propaganda from this channel. Basically all day in big letters "genocide in gaza" with anti-jewish paroles. I can understand why Israel decides to close down such a channel.

I’m not sure about “dark day for the media” but it does feel like a dark day for Israel.

Once you’ve established that the government can unilaterally ban a voice for reasons of “national security” you’ve essentially given them a free pass. As Americans living post-9/11 will know, “national security” is a deliberately elastic term that can cover anything required in the moment.

Users have a wide range of conflicting views about what HN does or doesn't have to do with. You can see that vividly in these past examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which go back many years but sound like they were posted last week.

HN's moderation approach is (a) most political stories are off topic (this is at the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for a reason), but a certain amount of political overlap is (b) inevitable—we learned that the hard way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251, and (c) in keeping with HN's organizing principle of intellectual curiosity.

Those are the principles, and they've been stable for a long time. Then there's which stories get to count as clearing the bar. That is also contentious, but a different question: it's about how to apply the principles, not what the principles should be.

We look for stories that contain significant new information [1], aren't too repetitive of recent discussion [2, 3], and have at least some chance of providing a foundation for intellectually curious conversation.

If you want to understand HN moderation, you need to understand the difference between those two questions—what the principles are vs. how to apply them in specific cases. It's the difference between the rules of a game and the calls made by refs on specific occasions.

The rules are stable and we're confident that they're right. Particular calls, not so much—we sometimes get them wrong. We're often willing to make adjustments in specific cases, especially when users persuade us that we got something wrong. But we're much less willing to change the rules themselves, because they've held up well over many years, and provide a good basis for running HN for its intended purpose [4].

As you can imagine, this question shows up often—especially on divisive topics like the OP—and I've written different versions of this answer many times. You can find a bunch of past explanations from threads about the current topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618973. If you, or anyone, still have questions after reading the current post, I suggest looking at that link (and the links back from there). If after that you still have a question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...