@Claire yeah *generally* i would want context dropped, because otherwise that opens up a harassment mechanism (if people can find everyone sharing a link just by clicking the link in the trending pane, that’s bad)
probably what i’d want is an additional flag on posting to simply allow people to opt out of having the link be counted (using CWs for this isn’t ideal, but might work well enough). i think a posteriori moderation is probably fine, but there should probably be individual link moderation of some sort, given that sometimes bad things crop up in, for example the opinion section of the BBC/CBC/NYT, and an admin might want to block that article from trending but not the entire news site.