But what does the study show? There was no control for anything. None of the data is valid. To clarify: how does the research team know the bots were interacting with people and not other bots?
I agree that the study was performed unethically and should not be published but observational studies are totally fine things to do.
A lot of research is "hey we looked at stuff and found this data that wiggles its eyebrows at some idea so we should fund more rigorous study design in the future." An individual paper does not need to fully resolve a question.
The reason not to publish this work is because the data was collected unethically and we don't want to reward or incentivize such work. Nothing to do with the quality of the data itself.
