I for one am sure people are being paid to hype up or report on BTC so that the people paying for those "news" reports can profit from the increased price.
This position being facilitated either by direct action or, more frequently, by enthusiastic prompting from a "blockchain consultant" acquaintance who offered to walk them through setting up a wallet (or even a miner / mining contract) and show them how to use it. You know, "just to see how it works."
Now that their curiosity has been elevated to, as Bitcoiners love to quip, actual "skin in the game" (both in terms of time/material investment and reputational commitment), they are biased to repeat the pro-bitcoin messaging points they've been spoonfed by what they believe to be a helpful, fashionably libertarian insider geek contact, but is in effect merely this generation's reboot of the garden variety penny stock shill.