One can claim that Twitter was lying about this number. But if he could prove they were lying, Musk would have gotten out of the deal.
If a human signs up for an account, and uses it occasionally, but there's ongoing automated scraping or posting using that account for a good chunk of the time - or more specifically "for the majority of the requests" - would we call that account spam or fake?
To answer your question, it would depend on what the account was doing. Scraping abuse could likely be handled in a more targeted manner.
I've signed up for websites before, manually, and switched to using automated tools to download all the content. Certainly more efficient than downloading stuff by hand. Isn't automation the kind of thing most developers would do in this scenario?
If you're doing it right, the website doesn't even know. At least not until it's too late ;)
Aside: a friend of mine wrote a script to perform the online check-in whenever he flew with his favourite airline. He reverse engineered the airline's official app, and duly wrote his own (Perl!) script to do the same. It spat out a pkpass file which he could load straight onto his phone.