The horde aspect might make it easier. The ones on twitter at least you can tell are just running the same script through a thesaurus basically. 20 people leaving the same comment is a little more obvious than just one

I think it was mostly location data but yeah https://blogs.gwu.edu/ipdgcsmartpower/2012/12/09/ingress-gathering-data-through-gaming/

There used to be a mobile game that would have you go around and complete tasks to fill out the map (still might be idk). That’s pretty much what google did with ingress