It's one possibility but what happens to these political threads is, more likely, auto-flag due to having more downvotes than comments. This always catches redditors by surprise because, I figure, on Reddit it's an encouraged behavior.

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defrost 2 days ago | parent [-]

Is there any comment from dang or tomhow on such auto flagging?

Not that I doubt you, it's just that I've only seen them talk about explicit flagging from users and weighting factors, which number of comments, number of downvotes, and comment tree shape fall under.

Political topics get a lot of user flagging and used to get a lot of explicit comment from users about their flagging because its politics which is understandable given such topics are almost always prominent in the mainstream media coverage.

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pandaman 2 days ago | parent [-]

Not sure about tomhow, but dang (and sama before him) commented on this many times, it's called "flamewar detector" if you want to search. Here is the first link I've found: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232311 (here he does not say it's flagged, just demoted so I might be misremembering, but I am pretty sure I read that it can flag too).

	▲	defrost 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's as I remember, flame war and rapid short volatile exchange detection leading to down ranking weighting .. I had the impression that explicit [flagging] was the visible mechanism for explicit core user disapproval (for inclusion, not necessarily of specific content) and kept separate from the invisible hand of algorithmic weights. The repeated takeaway I see is that they are still open for discussion on aspects of all that:- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39233617