Twitter isn't the big dog in news distribution among social media. It's at best in 3rd place but more realistically 4th place. Your conflating of followers with users (and humans) is woefully uninformed.
Small groups of private citizens decide talking points all the time. Furthermore, hunters lap and laptop still remained a talking point regardless of what twitter did, because a small private (pun intended) group of citizens at news Corp and and rudi made it a talking point. Your selective outrage is hilarious.