Last week X filed suit in London over a network of accounts it says manufactured its own engagement. It wants GBP 207,384 back. Two of the accounts allegedly posted near identical content eleven seconds apart.
No dunking here. The uncomfortable part is structural.
If a number can be farmed hard enough that the platform has to sue over it, that number was never a trust signal. It was a scoreboard. Scoreboards get gamed.
Reputation has to sit somewhere the person being judged cannot edit.