A group of users on Reddit essentially decided to poke Wall Street with a stick. The result was a surge of GameStop’s stock, crocodile tears from hedge fund managers, and of course, Big Tech censorship.
Discord reportedly banned the WallStreetBets server, claiming that content on the server constituted “hate speech.” The move added fuel to the fire of an already contentious situation.
“We decided to remove the server and its owner from Discord for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings,” Discord said in a statement to The Verge. “To be clear, we did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks.”
Moderators of the subreddit responded to the ban: “We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad.”
The moderators claimed that they had done their best to moderate the server: “We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore.” In a rapidly growing forum with an alleged 250,000 users, moderation proved to be a difficult task.
Reddit users have massively upended the hedge fund strategy of short selling stocks. Investors short sell stocks by “borrowing it from someone else, selling it and, hopefully, repurchasing it at a lower price later,” according to Popular Information newsletter writer and former ThinkProgress Editor-in-Chief Judd Legum. Because investors are “borrowing” stocks from other people, they have to eventually return them, which is why investors generally buy the stocks back at a lower price.
Once GameStop stocks begin to increase, however, “lenders start to ask for their stock back. That means short sellers have to buy GameStop to close their position, driving the stock up further,” said Legum. Now that investors have to buy back these stocks at skyrocketing prices, they have suffered massive financial losses to the tune of “$23.6 billion this year through the close of trading Wednesday on GameStop alone, according to financial analytics company S3 Partners, including $14.3 billion on Wednesday when the stock price jumped 135%, its largest percentage increase in history, to a record $347.51,” reported The Wall Street Journal (The Journal). This has led some investors to call for “legal and regulatory repercussions,” The Journal reported.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Discord and demand that Big Tech be held to account to provide clarity on “hate speech,” rules that seem to be applied inconsistently If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
