The site guidelines ask you not to make insinuations about things like astroturfing and brigading. People typically reach for those explanations to account for behavior they dislike, like people expressing an opposing view, when a much simpler explanation almost always suffices: divisive topics are divisive.

If you're really concerned about it you can email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. But please avoid casual insinuations of nefariousness, because those are a problem in their own right—they erode community. And from everything I've seen, having looked at it a lot, this is actually a much bigger problem than the underlying phenomenon people are worrying about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've written about this a lot if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...