Manipulation is definitely occuring. A lot of it is marketing campaigns, but that's mostly benign. Some of it is actually harmful, such as the US government paying social media influencers and other famous people to encourage compliance with COVID mandates (e.g. Jimmy Kimel promoting the COVID vaccines, the dancing nurses, etc).

Concerning "bot activity", 100% of that is human-controlled. There are no programs producing new content [0]. All "bot activity" consists of accounts controlled by a single person, who uses his accounts to spam his content. But most bot activity is only effective at convincing very gullible people. The rest require actual human interaction [1].

FWIW, you can very easily avoid manipulation online. First, install an ad-blocker, such as uBlock Origin. Second, stop consuming mass media: social media, news, TV, radio, movies, magazines. There is some mass media that might be worth consuming, but 90% of it is either garbage or manipulative. But finding that 10% is very time-consuming.

[0] = AIs like ChatGPT do not generate new content. They mix up and regurgitate content that they found on the Internet.

[1] = Broke college students and mommy bloggers will happily promote your dumb product or tyrannical policies.