And who will blow the whistle? One person could deploy a bot army to juice numbers.
On a related note, the market itself is controlled by HFT bots. Don't rock the boat too much and no one is the wiser.
Edit: Would love to some actual debate on this rather than downvotes with no context. I have deployed many bots for fun to twitter and reddit. I could easily do the same on Instagram, Snap or Facebook. I could even make them look "Kinda real" with markov chain driven text input. Super, duper easy.
I suspect people are downvoting because it's easier than getting into a discussion with someone whose tone doesn't convey a willingness to have a constructive conversation.
Your blithe comment has some merit on its surface -- I also "think" it seems trivial to do account fraud at a large scale -- but it pattern matches against the "I can build Stack Overflow in a weekend" mode. I can only guess, but I imagine the difficulty factor going from 500 to 1 million bots is much greater than 200x higher. (As in, if there are 1,000,000 people right now on Earth who could do the former, I suspect there are way fewer than 1mm/500 for the latter.)
There are undoubtedly bot networks that operate (although we have no idea for how long), at a scale that would likely surprise me. However, even that doesn't make the data useless (especially when frequently cited against a previous measurement).
Finally, your non-sequitur about markets being controlled by HFT bots hit a number of negative heuristics in my brain.
On a related note, the market itself is controlled by HFT bots. Don't rock the boat too much and no one is the wiser.
Edit: Would love to some actual debate on this rather than downvotes with no context. I have deployed many bots for fun to twitter and reddit. I could easily do the same on Instagram, Snap or Facebook. I could even make them look "Kinda real" with markov chain driven text input. Super, duper easy.