Hi just a heads up. Check out this post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/37758799
It got so many upvotes in a such a short time I checked out its activity from an mbin instance. And most of these upvotes are coming from sh.itjust.works accounts which were all created 2 months ago, most on 2/16, and have never posted/commented. There was a similar post in the lemmy.world/c/world community linking to the same website and having a similarly high number of upvotes within minutes, but that post seems to be gone now.
Thank goodness for the open platform that Lemmy is. It’s nice knowing that these things can be caught so easily.
Though it’s a bit of a confirmation bias. Only the ones we caught are those we know about.
I won’t detail how, but it would be pretty trivially easy to make it much harder to catch. This is just utter laziness on behalf of the vote manipulators.
I think a statistical analysis that looks at what accounts nearly only upvote the same comments or posts as another account would probably be the DIY gold standard for catching vote manipulation on the lemmyverse.