Comment by nitrogen
10 years ago
I've seen it happen on YouTube (not to me); highly upvoted comments get copy/pasted a month or two later to "steal" upvotes for someone else.
It could be a bot tactic to build accounts with karma that can later be used for astroturfing, using proven comments from elsewhere. Maybe governments and organized astroturfers have automated that sort of thing more than we think.
Nail, meet hammer.
Hopefully in this case the nail is comment plagiarism and the hammer is more careful pattern matching in moderation systems.