More importantly, other commentors here have already admitted to flagging this entry. The way flagging exists now rewards one-sideism and partisan behaviour - all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters. A counter-flag option would balance things.
That's not accurate, because if a story is interesting to the vast majority of users, it will get lots of upvotes—and lots of upvotes is enough to defeat a small number of flags. In that sense, we already have the counter-flag option you're arguing for.
I assumed this thread had been axed and manually reapproved. Probably likewise for some of the other people posting inb4s.
What’s your level of confidence that these threads aren’t getting flagged as part of a coordinated effort? Be that a lone MAGA nutter running 20 sock puppets through resnet proxies, or a paid covert influence campaign?
If there were theoretically a common cluster of accounts all repeatedly flagging political posts unfavorable to the Trump admin within a few minutes of each other, do you currently have the tooling in place to see that happen?
I certainly don’t speak for everyone on HN, but I think the allegations of censorship here have more to do with the specter of bad actors abusing the flag system to limit the reach of certain posts, rather than you or anyone else affiliated with Big Ycombinator (TM) putting your thumb directly on the scale.