If I short a stock, I borrow the share and the sell it on the market. If I loan the share to someone else and they sell it then it is still only sold once.
In my opinion it's more likely that people were either selling naked calls (which would convert into an IOU for stock) or that people were selling shares that didn't actually exist on the open market.
I don't know enough about settlement to verify the latter claim, but there are some reports of shares taking an excessively long time to settle. Those kind of irregularities should probably be more closely investigated.
Being able to discern large scale themes and patterns in data, then using those findings distill the original data input to minimally redundant messages, is similar to the goal of an AGI that can comprehend any input data.
I interviewed at Facebook with the intention of getting an offer letter I could use as a bargaining chip with my first choices. I was rejected, but fortunately got into my first choice anyway. Despite all the perks and compensation, I would never want to work for Facebook.