Comments on this topic get tons of downvotes and flags because it's a flamewar topic and they're usually flamewar comments. That null hypothesis is more than adequate to explain what you're observing. If you want to claim organized abuse, there needs to be evidence beyond garden-variety internet identity war.
People are biased about this because they overestimate the offenses of the enemy comments by (let's be conservative and say) 10x and underestimate the offenses of their own by 10x. That creates a 100x distortion. Everyone does that, so everyone sees the argument as overwhelmed by bad behavior from the other side—always from the other side, never from mine. Indeed the other side behaves so badly that (this is the 100x logic speaking) the only thing that could possibly explain how badly the other side behaves is sinister manipulation, astroturfing, brigading, and (word du jour!) disinformation, most likely by spies, foreign agents, and provocateurs. If that 100x were a mere 2x or 5x, it might dawn on people how cartoonish this thinking is, but 10000x is a hell of a dose.
Nobody looks at how they themselves (and their team) are breaking the rules and adding to the problem. After all, the other team is spies and foreign agents and racists, so what could be more natural than me feeling justly, righteously indignant about their abuses? I/we are innocent, you/they are guilty: that is the entire story.
Another thing nobody looks at is how this mechanism works exactly the same way in every thread and recreates the same flamewar every time. We're all fighting wars in our own head, or rather the same war over and over again, projecting the same demons in every case. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
We all have this insanity, and internet comments are a perfect device for bringing it out, because we have so little information about each other and our insane imaginations eagerly fill in all the gaps, without us ever considering we're doing that. The only saving grace is that these online wars are mostly confined to a teapot.
I hope it's clear that I'm not picking on you personally. Everyone in these flamewars is doing it—your comment just happened to be a place to hang a reply. Unfortunately, no matter how often we plead with users to take the site guidelines seriously and develop awareness of how they (and their team) are also breaking them, these threads are getting worse.
There's no way to measure how much sufficiently smart-and-sinister manipulation may be happening because by definition, if it's sinister enough, then it can't be detected—but that way of thinking is madness. The simple fact is that the human mind is its own sinister manipulator, and is more than enough to explain the dynamics that break out in these threads. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...