I definitely agree that the numbers should be scrutinized. If they are materially affected by bots/spammers, the strange thing is that the relative distribution follows smoothly all the way through to the smaller accounts. That would be a strange thing for spammers to do. They look organic to me, but I am open to other explanations.
Discussion
#[3] is a smart guy that has some work on follower counts. Maybe he can help figure this out.
I'm not seeing the original post for some reason. What's the noteID of the start of the thread? It could be that whoever's doing the counting is counting duplicates either in the db or from multiple relays.