Re that link: I turned off the flags on it earlier, but it isn't a great story for HN. The way it is written is as tendentious as it gets; at minimum, we would need a more neutral source.
Beyond that, there are endless stories about weird patterns showing up in someone's limited set of data points on the internet. I can tell you from personal experience running one of these sites* that sometimes these turn out to just be people seeing patterns in randomness, as humans do; sometimes they are actually happening, but people are misinterpreting and jumping to dramatic conclusions about them; and sometimes (though rarely) they turn out to be an interesting story. What that means is that the existence of a post like this isn't enough of a signal to make for a good HN thread. At minimum there would need to be more information. This is the case regardless of what side of any political fence a post or an author happens to be on.
* a tiny one compared to the big fish! but big enough to observe all these phenomena, which show up increasingly at scale
Yeah I get that, the link itself wasn't much. What made that thread interesting IMO was people reporting what hashtags work or don't work for them in what country, pondering possible explanations, etc. At least from my perspective, and this goes back to sites like slashdot, it's not always about what TFA can do for us, but what we can do for TFA, if you know what I mean.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/esatdedezade/2025/01/21/meta-fa...
https://www.techspot.com/news/106464-meta-denies-forcing-acc...