this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:

While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.

Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?

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[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

But I can’t help but note that the system seems intentionally blind to targeted harassment, which can be a source, if not cause, of bad faith accounts. (And likely those need different approaches since those are also niche cases themselves.)

If you mean using puppet accounts to massively downvote someone, that's also tracked, but with another tool

[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 hours ago

Not necessarily puppet accounts, just brigading in general.

It's the rationale many instances used to defederate hexbear. (Even though iirc hexbear disables downvotes, so they're defederated for users mass posting, usually that hogshit image, instead of mass voting.) It wasn't puppets or bot accounts at any rate.

But then there's repost communities where users share comments (especially in places they or their audience is banned from) or DMs for a group response.

Not to mention the whole 'block and downvote all .ml on sight' mentality. But hopefully that might be something this tool could catch.