Volatility, Liquidity and Market participation work hand-in-hand to define the condition at which the market moves. With low liquidity and market participation, the market could be very volatile and could also be manipulated as well, which is why we see some spikes and haphazard movements at times when the market is speedy. This could cause some unrest and whipsaws as well, conditions that are not good for trading. However, it's often difficult for the market to be manipulated when the liquidity and participation are high. This is when you see the market smoothly sailing towards a definitive trend without much of the dangerous moves.
Mind you, any market could experience high or thin liquidity, gold is not an exception, and when it comes to volatility in the market, gold is one of the assets on the high side, it's volatile.
So long story short manipulation due to low liquidity is very common at low cap tokens and that's something that cause a lot of people to lose money as well. One whale could make it go up a lot all by themselves, make it trending and liked by a lot because of how much it went up, and then they could sell it to all those new buyers to make their profit from it as well.