It could be true. But let me just state a few facts that would show that your theory is difficult to happen. There are hundreds of international cryptocurrency exchanges all over the world. And there are hundreds more local exchanges which are pretty much unknown internationally. Each of these exchanges have hundreds of trading pairs with BTC. If you want to control the BTC price with bots, you will have to infiltrate more than 50% of these pairs in these exchanges. Now, that picture makes your theory close enough to impossible.

If there are manipulators, it is the whales who are owning hundreds of thousands of BTC.