this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Pretty sure that's "vote manipulation"
Fundamentally, though, how can it be stopped? The two instance administrators can only see part of what's happening, and can't directly determine that the votes are coming from two alts of the same user. Maybe over enough times, the patterns can be guessed at with heuristics, but this kind of vote manipulation is going to be a problem for federated communities. Especially if we don't get better moderation tools developed.
It gets stopped by this:
https://imgur.com/a/JqPHEeg
What's the mechanism by which an admin would be able to tell if one user voted more than once on the same post? Instance admins can't see the votes of the accounts on other instances.
Admins can see all votes of users on their instance, as well as all voter's usernames on a post located in a community that's on that instance. So if they get suspicious amount of votes from a user on another user's post, they might consider that vote manipulation and ban either the voter, or poster, or both. (Although, banning a poster for receiving suspicious amount of votes can lead to wrongful ban, since someone could just make random alts to consistently upvote someone they hate in attempt to ban them.)
The admins probably saw suspicious votes and banned those users.