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Innocent is perhaps the operative word. If investors expect and/or used to certain amount of fakery they are not "innocent" [1] or if the competitors are doing the same thing they are not necessarily "innocent" either.

[1] In this context to take meaning as knowledge, not meaning "not guilty" here.

If a site like Reddit gets started by creating nonexistent or sock-puppet users, for instance, that's hardly on the same level as falsifying medical tests "just until we get the bugs sorted out."

The conviction here was defrauding investors, not defrauding medical tests.

If Reddit included those sock-puppet users in their metrics to investors, then that would be roughly equivalent fraud.

In the legal sense, competition doesn’t qualify as an innocent party.