• PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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    11 hours ago

    Hm… I’m not sure it is worth bothering too much about, honestly. That said:

    There is a little bit of a suspicious pattern. Three different accounts, all active during the same short span of time (space of 6 minutes) during a quiet time, all giving one downvote to the post, and then a couple downvotes and upvotes in the comments boosting a particular point of view in slightly different ways.

    One of the suspicious voters seems to be to be clearly a bad-faith political propaganda account, which is interesting. I have a theory that some of the political propagandists like to incite pointless drama related to specific mods, or specific hot-button issues like veganism, just to add noise and unpleasantness to the system, and give a vehicle if they want to attack some particular user or get them riled up to motivate moderator action against them.

    Just a little bit of correlation doesn’t necessarily mean anything, of course. Sometimes random data contains stuff that looks like patterns but isn’t. On the other hand, two of those accounts are on the same instance, which means it’s easy to send a DM to one of the admins pointing it out so that they can check to see if they’re coming from the same IP or other indications that they’re the same person doing voter fraud.

    Do you think it’s worth bothering? A small amount of voting fraud is kind of the nature of the beast, and it’s hard to be sure about this kind of thing.