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).
I don't disagree with you, but the left has always had a need for control. Maybe it isn't three letter agencies that may have taken over voat, but I firmly believe there is some deep state fuckery going on, or possibly some Soros funded folks taking over the admin for the sole purpose of doing what has happened lately: divide the user base and pit us against each other.
It is happening with the U.S. as a whole with rich vs. poor, brown/black vs white, straight vs. rainbow, christian vs. atheist/islam/whatever, et al. and now within the right we are being split by outside forces as to weaken us to their fight.
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.