You don't need much inside knowledge to see this in action: the ability of a trending topic to change corporate behavior has been established for years at this point. And as I said, for tech, this problem is particularly bad.

For a very recent example, consider the Damore memo as a recent example. Leaving aside what action you think should have been taken (_really_ not interested in that discussion right now), there was a marked shift in Google's reaction to the memo once it hit the idiots of the twitterati and blew up. PR matters to companies.