No doubt voat a honeypot of some sort, but this almost seems more like damage control by the voat team, or some other shill army that is heavily invested in the tools and accounts they use to manipulate the platform. If it was actually run by feds, I can't imagine why putt's account would have changed character so drastically, and all but encouraged the userbase to leave. I just don't think feds would be that sloppy.
Based on the lefts' ability to meme and online presence coupled with how the feds have fucked up and covered up in the past, I would not put sloppiness past the feds, much less a small branch of them attempting to control narrative on a site dedicated to free speech.
Damage control or not, Voat no longer seems like it is for free speech, but likewise controlling their own narrative and policing what they believe as "wrongthink."
If it was the feds, the part I have the most trouble accepting is their need to be involved with the administration at all. I think a mix of "radical" undercover fed accounts and a wiretap on the voat servers would give them all the functionality they could ever need from the platform.
Make no mistake, I believe voat is crawling with feds of every type, I just think they're more about surveillance and entrapment. Maybe in the case of the CIA or NSA they might try to sway popular opinion, but even that would be best done with sock accounts and an army of bots to manipulate vote totals (IMO).
Due to this, I'm starting to believe the "honeypot" theory more and more. Mainly due to the large amount of Putt and Atko shills