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From what I have observed anything even tangentially related the Biden stories gets to the front page quickly and sometimes it sticks there for a few minutes then gets flagged enough to start dropping down the ranks. This one lasted a lot longer on the front page than most have.

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So two thoughts here.

Are they artificially inflated and then deflated to counter act “bot” behavior?

OR

are they organically inflated and then censored?

I just wish I could be a fly on the wall and know. I just can’t believe this would be a damning enough piece to artificially inflate unless there’s a serious game of reverse psychology going on behind the scenes

I'd bet on bot-busting or possibly something that de-ranks stuff with political keywords close to the election to avoid spam and noise. Human moderation and content curation is a lot rarer than people think online. Primarily because it takes a lot of labor and and response times tend to be slow compared to how fast things go viral.

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