It's probably the case with any viral news story that 2/5 of comments about it are by bots within the first few days. Bots latch onto anything to get engagement.

How about the universe where the us government threatens to shut it down unless you sell it to its cronies?

Good luck timing the burst, everything is a bubble

It works 99% of the time and you are overindexing on the 1% of the time it doesn’t to draw your conclusion.