It does raise an interesting idea... If you want to suppress and discredit something, just spin up a pile of bots to heavily promote that which you want to censor. Bonus points if you route it through VPNs in Russia or China or North Korea.
Then 'real' users who started typing would autofill with the false one and the topic would lose steam quicker. Of course, without knowing Twitters proprietary algorithms, this is all just anecdotal.
To me it seems like two different cases that are easy to distinguish.