Sometimes they manually down-rank stories to take them out of sight, and sometimes the storry gets flagged so much. But it is #6 on the front page right now.
So two thoughts here.
Are they artificially inflated and then deflated to counter act “bot” behavior?
OR
are they organically inflated and then censored?
I just wish I could be a fly on the wall and know. I just can’t believe this would be a damning enough piece to artificially inflate unless there’s a serious game of reverse psychology going on behind the scenes