What isn't market manipulation? Seriously, market manipulation goes on all the time at grandiose scales and at small scales. This time, it's probably a handful

What isn't market manipulation? Seriously, market manipulation goes on all the time at grandiose scales and at small scales. This time, it's probably a handful of people who had critical mass and the mass is following suit. If you analyze and act on a market based on an analysis, you are manipulating the market, period. HFT for example happens at time scales never conceived before and are almost undoubtedly market manipulation. The only way not to manipulate the market is to not interact with it. It really becomes this arbitrary pointing game where subjectivity is thrown into play and favors are called as to who is or isn't breaking the rules. Yes, there are some more established less arbitrary examples of manipulation strategies, but if anyone thinks for a second these are the limit of options available to manipulate investor perceptions, they're naive. And to spin this further, in the world of growing disinformation or selective information herding campaigns by foreign governments and political organizations swaying elections in the US, how do you deal with those sorts of targeted campaign strategies that are almost undoubtedly, in my opinion, used to manipulate markets as well? If we can't pinpoint actors threatening the fundamental security of our nation, how do we hope to deal with this in regulating financial systems where blatant abuse is left to pass already.