Not to mention, a single person creating thousands of bot accounts is easy, you need those thousand other bots so your one primary bot has enough followers/likes. But in the press that will be counted as 1000s instead of 1. Not to mention getting those bots to get a meaningful audience is very challenging.

I have plenty of fake 'bot' followers, and 99.9% of their followers are other bot. It's largely a bunch of bots tweeting to other bots.

The main risk is hashtags being gamed and people buying voting rings/followers... which has been a problem on the internet forever.