I still think theres a lot of speculation and assumption about this whole ordeal. I'm waiting for more evidence / clarification.
I don't think we will never know at this point...
The only obvious thing is that a single bot cannot be the major cause of a bitcoin bubble.
The simple fact that all the trading volume was equally spread throughout all the major exchanges pretty much proves that all the panic buying was real and not the product of some bot on ONE exchange (aside from fake volume, which doesn't directly influence the price anyway).