It's a good weekend project, just gotta be careful not to fall for motivated reasoning and not to overreach. A heavy prior suspicion of conspiracy doesn't help.

A sibling comment mentioned a few details already, but there's a good amount of information out there about how HN's post ranking system and moderation works, that'd probably be good to also consider. Maybe reaching out to the mods would also be helpful in the way of this.

To give you an anecdotal example, if I see a post mentioning how LLMs are "just next token predictors", I'm basically flagging that by reflex at this point. Not because it'd be literally untrue, but because it's asinine overall. But you won't be able to infer this from data, only the fact that a post using "AI-critical language" was flagged.

Or there was another post about how Ireland's electricity use is so-and-so % data center driven, further suggesting that this is trending up. This was not true, and the article was further horribly unhelpful in actually putting this fact into context, or properly conveying the trends. I think I ended up flagging that one as a result, after posting - what I thought - was a lot fairer picture (and even that was awfully lacking in context). Once again, an "AI-critical" post which on the face of it would have been simply censored if enough flags gathered.

There's also the mundane human angle to this, where people enthusiastic about <thing> won't necessarily be the most receptive to criticism to it, and will be more likely to try and pick that criticism apart. Gotta match the audience on some level.