Okay, i have talked to frimble and apparently there's some institutional knowledge that didn't get transmitted to me (and possibly to other mods as well). There are actually two separate things going on here, and i had been under the impression that they were the same thing: Adding the "USPolitics" tag to a post allows it to be hidden using the "hide US politics" toggle. However, adding a post to the sidebar and actually hiding it does have to be done manually. I'll bear this in mind going forward and make sure the rest of the mods know this as well.
MeFi mod log archive
An archive of MetaFilter's
Recent Mod Actions
log