I have seen this happening multiple times, some to fairly reasonable comments with a just tiny negative tone.

There is also flagging abuse which effectively kills the comment /post.

I know for a fact at least 1 bigger US company has a bot in slack that brings up any mentions of $companyname on hackernews...

It's been my experience that hn and reddit have a very high overlap in audience these days. The jerrybreakseverything crowd. Anything anti-tesla, anti-grok, is applauded.