I don’t think you understand how botnets work. They generate engagement and activity for their posts by engaging with their peer bots in order to get into algorithms. Definitionally when you get a network you expose the whole one. So these bots interacting on such a small scale indicates they were testing something rather than actually deploying it as a mass campaign.

The Iraq war was popular because the public and media were out for blood and the government made a convenient lie lol. Not because the CIA got into your internet chat rooms.