> The weirdest part is how regular people pick sides and defend their billionaire

Someone told me in another comment that it's possibly bot activity. I suspect so too, because in a tech forum like HN, a top voted comment can shift the entire focus/narrative of any given issue. I know there are a lot of mods on here to prevent this sort of thing, but given how good LLMs have gotten, I wonder if we are at a point where humans can even discern cases where this a mix of human and AI involvement in online activity (such as commenting).

It's not only single comments, but if you surround people in a sea of opinion, they will definitely start swimming in your direction. Thought, that's probably more important on reddit.