The problem here is that basically everything is wire fraud. For instance if you wrote a lie to me on these forums with the intent to somehow enrich yourself, that could viably be seen as felony wire fraud - with up to 20 years in prison. Exaggerated credentials on a CV you sent by email? Wire fraud. Emailing in for sick leave when you're not? Wire fraud. Most of us have committed wire fraud, probably multiple times, throughout our lives. Obviously you're not going to be charge with wire fraud for those sort of things in practice, at least not unless the government wants to nail you. And I think that nuance of them just being able to tack on heavy charges at their discretion is quite undesirable.

That's not to say we should encourage lying or botting or whatever else, but they need their own statutes as opposed to a 50s era law which has turned into a catch-all superlaw with really harsh penalties. So in this case exactly what was the crime committed? Terms of service violations aren't illegal, neither is lying to or exploiting companies, neither is running bots. Wire fraud is dragged out exactly in circumstances like this when the government wants a conviction but it's not clear what law was broken, because even if no law was broken, they probably committed wire fraud, because everything is wire fraud.

It's also a highly asymmetric law. For instance Sony famously got the No Man's Sky (video game) people to lie through their teeth about what the game was going to include. They made countless millions of dollars from these lies. That's 100% wire fraud, but because they're a giant company lying and exploiting people 'by wire' is just standard operating procedure, and they didn't even get a slap on the wrist. For that matter all false advertising would be wire fraud, but again that gets back to the point that everything is wire fraud.

I am accustomed to employing sarcasm, irony, satire, fiction and all sorts of devices in my speech and rhetoric. However it seems that sort of goofing-around isn't really supported by mainstream social media platforms. I have had several close friends and colleagues humorlessly prompt me to be more serious and less chaotic, especially on Facebook.

I can understand that saying things we don't sincerely mean, and outright lying or being insincere for supposed comedic or dramatic effect, can be utterly misconstrued in a public forum. Sadly, my mind is really conditioned to not even care what are the effects of what I say when I'm typing it into a computer.

I try not to maintain any public social media accounts, and so hopefully my sardonic sense of humor can be contained to friends and allies who sort of understand where I'm coming from.

I am well aware of “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”. Just that this is clearly not that.

Let's turn the tables. Imagine instead of an individual doing this, it was a company doing basically the same thing but in reverse. So they populated their site with bots creating fabricated posts and people to drive 'manufactured engagement' from their users, try to reach critical mass, bloat their advertisement appeal, and generally make a bunch of money.

Is it still a felony worth spending years in prison for? I am speaking practically, not ideologically. The main thing this user did was to exploit advertisers paying out on the world's most gameable metric (exactly as our site would be doing in the above example). Yet that, in and of itself, is not a crime, which is why they ended up relying on wire fraud charges.