mjThey basically just copied the playbook from how they dominated social media platforms for the last 15 yrs.
Before #bots could write well enough, these same principles & outcomes were being handled 1st by human agents, later by humans using computers & finally autonomous LLMs instigated by humans.
The platforms / publishers benefit from this #blackhat behavior because 1 of their primary arbiters of quality is quantity, which is easily gamed, even w/o automation.
Connecting fake nodes to others is critical, whether followers or citations. From there, they create higher order #disinformation.