Not new at all. What I think might be new is the confluence of that type of manipulation with a much more primitive pump style that's been greatly amplified by social media.
When I was about 21, I opened my first trading account. On E*Trade. Early days for online trading. I spent a lot of time researching stocks, but I was just a kid and was pretty unhip to the many ways things could be manipulated. Thank God there wasn't WSB at that point. So one night I'm sitting at a restaurant bar, waiting for food, and these two stock brokers are sitting next to me talking about a series of trades they were planning on a penny stock, a startup drug company. Natch, I listened in and they noticed and were happy to share their inside info with me. "It's $0.10, just make sure you unload it at $0.50. No more than a week." Great. I went home, looked at this thing, and put in an order for about a third of my savings. It was an OTC stock. Three days later, it shot up to $0.60 and I tried to sell it. And........ nothing happened. E*Trade was a no go. Couldn't make them execute it on the phone. The stock started to spiral. Next day, no sale. No market maker. No one buying. Stock collapsed to $0.05. I called my dad and told him about this wild ride and all he said was, "you got hustled by those guys at the bar." And incredibly, that had never occurred to me.
Take that level of innocence, multiply by a few million young investors on social media who think Elon is Jesus, and, well, market manipulation can scale up exponentially.