My own area of investigation is r/politics, and I was able to gather significant data about the brigading operation there during the week - although I wasn't focusing as heavily on the spam attack since it was difficult to distinguish between spam and the ordinary skewing effects of a hostile news cycle.

I conducted two investigations, one a raw count of six hours of posts in the New queue that were old enough to have stable vote totals, and the other a half-hour sampling of rapid voting (first five minutes) as new posts appeared in the same queue.

My findings about the six-hour sample were as follows (rounding to nearest percent):

• 81% of anti-Trump posts had zero scores.

• 85% of pro-Clinton posts had zero scores.

• 0% pro-Trump posts had zero scores.

• 1% of anti-Clinton posts had zero scores.

• Average score of anti-Trump posts: 2

• Average score of pro-Clinton posts: 15

• Average score of pro-Trump posts: 120

• Average score of anti-Clinton posts: 646

In the half-hour sampling of brand-new posts, 10 out of 11 anti-Trump posts were immediately zeroed within 5 minutes of posting, and the 11th was zeroed within 15 minutes. Most were zeroed instantly - they effectively appeared on Reddit already with a score of zero or lower.

In several cases I determined (by seeing how my own upvote changed the percentage score next to the zero) that the post had somehow received on order of 50 downvotes instantaneously. In one case - which was an impeccable and highly damaging news article about the Russian hack and Trump's involvement - the instant downvotes were on order of 100.

Although I didn't count them because they were almost every post, brand-new anti-Clinton and pro-Trump posts usually appeared with an instantaneous block of 5 upvotes with mechanistic regularity. Although in some cases the instant upvotes were as high as 15. Multiples of 5 upvotes for supported content appear to be a regular feature of the Trumputin botnet.

After reporting this information in a megathread in r/politics, all of my comments began being universally and heavily downvoted. Admins informed me I was being targeted by a botnet, and appear to have neutralized it - as least in my personal case. They have not responded to requests for detailed information about how they're dealing with the massive brigade phenomenon.

Feel free to share any data you have gathered along similar lines, or any other information you've gathered that's of relevance.

I will be making a survey of a 24-hour block from the r/politics New queue that I will report back with.

Hope this data is if of use to someone, and thanks for this sub. It's wonderful that other people are fighting back.