Comment by c-riq
The idea is to make things like petitions or demonstrations easier on a global scale and to also make voting data accessible for independent analysis, where further manipulation attempts can be identified and excluded. My guess is that it's much cheaper to create 10000 fake accounts on facebook etc than to send 10000 requests from unique residential IPv4 addresses in a target country, which are also evenly distributed across Internet Service Providers and IP blocks to evade detection.