So there is a post on /r/The_Donald claiming that the AMA by Donald Trump, an American presidential nominee, was subject to vote manipulation by the Reddit administrators. Apparently, the number of votes fell by thousands over the course of several hours. Now, I certainly like to think the best of the admins, in part because a lot of people in the Reddit 'shitlordsphere' do not buy the idea that the admins are out to push a political agenda.

Unfortunately, upon further investigation, it turned out that it is even worse than it was claimed. The vote manipulation was not a one-time affair either: over the course of eight hours, the upvote numbers on Trump's AMA fell by about 10,000 - while the 'total vote number' remained constant (as can be judged by the percentage of votes indicated).

Here are all the archives on that post. In the first 1.5 hours of the post being upvotes rose to 11,789. The post went from being almost unanimously upvoted to being quite controversial - the 11,789 made up only 63% of the upvotes on the post. This may be manipulation, or it may be people downvoting it as it got to /r/all.

About 10 minutes after midnight UTC is apparently where the manipulation by the admins began. After this, the 63% remained constant, even as the net upvotes started falling off a cliff. In the first fifteen minutes, the post lost 750 upvotes (11,020 remaining). After one hour and ten minutes](http://archive.is/5IPAu), the post was at 8,633. This went all the way down to 1,752 in the last archive... with the percentage of upvotes still being 63%.

I ran a regression analysis on the relationship between the number of upvotes and the time elapsed since the second archive (since the manipulation may have started somewhere between the two) and the second to last one. An exponential regression shows that 97.1% of the upvotes are explained by the number of intervening minutes. A simple calculation also shows that there is a negative correlation of -0.94 between the number of elapsed minutes and the net upvotes on the AMA. Even if we assumed that brigadiers are responsible for downvotes, and the 63% was just a glitch, they would have to be an organized army of thousands, each downvoting at the designated minute, in order to achieve this result. Ockham's razor suggests that there was not.

Here you can see it for yourself.

No, this appears to be the algorithm the Reddit administrators use to nerf posts they dislike. And while I do understand that they don't want 2/3 of the posts on /r/all being shitposts and meme-posts on /r/The_Donald, which are something that probably do not interest the average /r/all browser, sabotaging the AMA of a presidential candidate is breathtaking in its audacity.

I know that some of you do not support Donald Trump. I certainly don't like either candidate. But even if free speech is insufficient to bring you to object to such blatant manipulation, think of the treatment that will be dealt out to us if we let them get away with blatant censorship, manipulation and unfairness. If we do not stand up for free speech even when we dislike it, ours may well be the next 'free speech' on the chopping block.