A similar thread regarding hiring Russians and/or Russian ex-pats after the recent escalation of the 2014 war of Ukraine wouldn't have been allowed here, nor your comment downvoted and the others upvoted. On recent Iran related threads a crazy amount of straight pro-Iranian and anti-American propaganda was allowed on an actively moderated discussion board of a financial group tightly tied to American tech. YCombinator has few specific carved out political propaganda narratives it puts it's thumb on discussions for, those that are anti-Israel and unbelievable to me post Iran war pro-Iran anti-American ones.
Be sure to let your Congressmen/Senator know the political position YCombinator choses to give weight to on it's moderated official discussion platform. Point your Senator/Congressmen to Iran threads here especially. It's probably good for the government to understand the limited, moderated 'thought' YCombinator choses for the average tech person who comes to this forum looking to learn what it takes to be in YCombinator's good favor.
I'm not going to highlight the ones I pointed out to my representatives as I don't want them specifically removed at this point but the Iran Lego propaganda one was pretty full of examples when I was screenshotting it. You can also google
site:news.ycombinator.com russian bot
versus
site:news.ycombinator.com hasbara
you won't get much returns on russian bot even those it was often used in the rare Ukraine/Russian threads (or more often sub threads) because it has been moderated/pushed to stop being used by the community. Hasbara usage as a pejorative response is pretty casual and accepted usage here however, and a single comment just responding 'hasbara' to what someone said has often been left up for the period I monitored to see if it would be moderated (basically the useful life of the threads discussion when leaving it up would be of impact). The difference shows the YCombinator thumb on the discourse on their moderated message boards. Hasbara is also worse in the it is using language (specifically hebrew) to otherize a group, to highlight their 'hasbara' as worse/something more nefarious than when other groups do it, using a foreign word that would be better conveyed/understood with an english word (showing the intent isn't to communicate a thought in the best way but is to 'other' a linguistic group that also happens to be a racial group), giving usage a racial/ethnic manipulation/hate dynamic. Unlike Russian bot I have never seen hasbara usage called out or pushed against by the moderation here though it is mostly used in an way interchangeable with how russian bot was which was called out by mods.
