You’ll know it’s their bot because the account is suspended and the profile page can’t be viewed. They deliberately get the account shadowbanned and manually approve the posts from the moderator queue so users can’t scrutinize the account’s post history. I suspect they’re buying upvotes because the posts frequently make it to the front page despite top comments being critical of the message.
The latter is correct. Automod quietly hides any comments containing words and language commonly used to point out what they’re doing. I’m astounded the site admins let such boldness fly.