“faking the number of users is securities fraud.”
Where the bots were launched from is very important.
If on twitter servers, that is hard smoking gun evidence of fraud.
If it was bots that are commonly used by issue advocacy groups, movie stars, politicians, product promotion, etc. , to create buzz and activity, then it has to be proven that twitter knew those external bots mimicking users were bots, and they lied about the extent.
Their plausibly deniability is “Our bot detection was not adequate to detect all bot activity.”. If twitter altered their bot detection code to look the other way in some ways, and that can be proven, that is hard smoking gun evidence of fraud.
Very good points, and requires an investigation into possible fraud.