This is plausible, although I’d submit that it requires enough “optics voters” to be pretty bad at optics. Specifically, they would need to be unaware of the negative optical consequences of the comment here having been at −43.
Moreover, there are presumably voters who downvoted Parr and upvoted Concerned User because they thought Parr’s posts were deeply problematic and that Concerned User was right to call them out. For this hypothesis to work, they must have been substantially outnumbered by the group you describe as “intellectual freedom voters.” (I say the “group you describe” because the described voting behavior would be the same one would expect from people who sympathize with Parr’s views on the merits; I see no clear way to exclude the sympathy rationale on voting behavior alone.)
This is plausible, although I’d submit that it requires enough “optics voters” to be pretty bad at optics. Specifically, they would need to be unaware of the negative optical consequences of the comment here having been at −43.
Moreover, there are presumably voters who downvoted Parr and upvoted Concerned User because they thought Parr’s posts were deeply problematic and that Concerned User was right to call them out. For this hypothesis to work, they must have been substantially outnumbered by the group you describe as “intellectual freedom voters.” (I say the “group you describe” because the described voting behavior would be the same one would expect from people who sympathize with Parr’s views on the merits; I see no clear way to exclude the sympathy rationale on voting behavior alone.)