Oh absolutely. That would be extremely petty and pointless. But definitely within the realm of possibility. But it wouldn't be bots. It's just as possible it could be people who just don't like bourgeoisie propaganda. Regardless of whether it is Western or Chinese bourgeoisie pushing it. Two wrongs don't make a right.

It is however supremely illustrative of the Privacy problems Lemmy as a whole has. Any admin of any Federated service can see all that activity at any time. You'd just hope that a moderator or administrator of a larger instance such as this would have a thicker skin. 4 down votes and they go searching for a reason to be a victim of something? I think it's something perhaps we've all done at one point in time or wondered to ourselves. But ante out that way publicly never a good look for anyone with authority.

I tried to bring a number of people over at that time when I joined. I know many of them browse and likely vote. But I also know that many of them don't interact or comment much due to the association with ML. I thought it a little too paranoid on their part. But Behavior like this doesn't help. Honestly about nine times out of 10 when I comment on an ml domain hosted Community or thread. It's because I didn't check. And just engaged with the content. I know there are others that feel the same. So it's not that far-fetched for people to read and vote but not interact.

Not sure how lemmy compares but it isn't unusual for user generated content online to follow a 1:9:90 distribution of posters, commenters, and lurkers. Just look a the number of upvotes a post gets compared to the number of comments it has and you can tell that most people who vote dont also comment.

I rarely comment because internet discussions tend towards arguments. I usually just upvote comments that already say what I was going to comment anyways.