From what I have observed anything even tangentially related the Biden stories gets to the front page quickly and sometimes it sticks there for a few minutes then gets flagged enough to start dropping down the ranks. This one lasted a lot longer on the front page than most have.

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

I'd bet on bot-busting or possibly something that de-ranks stuff with political keywords close to the election to avoid spam and noise. Human moderation and content curation is a lot rarer than people think online. Primarily because it takes a lot of labor and and response times tend to be slow compared to how fast things go viral.