alt Hacker News> Do these posts just get upvoted due to the graphics/animations?
I don't think so. It's more likely that they're upvoted as a signal-boost; convene here to talk about bad government tech.
Some submissions are less about the subject matter than they are about providing a space to talk about only the subject in general. I've found this to be the case when the content is AI-generated.
That may be true in some cases, but I disagree about that in this case. TFA links to numerous sources for it's data (e.g. https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/723186/ for the White House app, and AFAICT exodus privacy is a legit service), and discussions around government applications that are loaded with surveillance tech (and in many cases it seems like the apps' primary, and sometimes only, purpose is data harvesting) seem very on-topic for HN.
Also, FWIW, while I found the layout of the top section of the article to be weird, the actual text body and linked sources were easy to read for me.