It was far more tinfoil a few years ago. Especially when the "bots" were far more likely to just be people paid to post things from a script. Back then there just wasn't much evidence of the tech being that good. Like human made content on YouTube has a noticable difference from generated content and that generated content probably still had some human help.
It has more legs today with chatgpt or similar tech. It clearly been used for pumping out crap articles and videos or being used for automating the early steps in scamming. There are even a few AI generated influencers and a few chatgpt based things designed to simulate a relationship.