Avg comments on a news platform increased from 2 to 3 in 2 days time. What are your hypotheses?

User behaviour
- People are emotionally charged up due to a recent event
- The rise in comments is from power users from a specific domain
- Holiday period and hence people have more time
Product/ Algorithm changes
- Recent UI changes in the platform for adding comments, notifs regarding that
- Some algorithm changes led to showing viral content at the top and people started commenting more
Bugs/ Platform changes
- Existing bug related to comments view got fixed, due to which the comments were not showing up earlier
- Artificial increase through chat bots

In order to validate my hypotheses, I would like to evaluate -

Any recent events that triggered people's emotions
Are these comments from all users or few users with very high comments
Whether it's a holiday perioed and if yes, then compare the trend same time next month, to check if it was holiday effect
Were there any UI changes released during that time
Did the team do any algorithm changes related to priroitising the content
Were there any bugs related to the comments feature fixed during that time or some limit threshold changed
Can we detect some spam activity in the platform which is causing this infaltion

To summarise my findings, a 50% jump in average comments is likely due to some content virality, product changes or some bugs/ spam activities internal to the platform. I need to go through the data points and analyse the content, posts, etc. to furhter zero down on the actual root cause