On Wednesday, January 27th, 2021, the price of Gamestop stock (GME) rose to $347, nearly a 200% increase from where it had been the day before. This event was shocking to many and challenged the mainstream understanding of the stock market. The Gamestop event gave light to several pieces of information that were previously unknown by the majority of people. Most obviously, many heard of r/WallStreetBets for the first time and only began to understand the function of Robinhood, an online stock-trading platform. The events that took place during the Gamestop fiasco have all been explained to death on social media sites such as TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. So, the explanation here will remain brief. Beyond the partly troubling nature of the event itself, most concerning about this situation is the question that it raises- how does the social media we use inform the economic decisions we make?
The Gamestop incident took advantage of the practice of short-selling poorly performing businesses, like Blockbuster and AMC. A short sell is essentially betting on a company to fail. A subreddit titled r/WallStreetBets took advantage of this and acted as a massive hedge fund, buying up unprecedented amounts of GME stock through an app called Robinhood, hiking the price and causing lots of short-selling investors to lose considerable amounts of money. This act was hailed as a movement by the proletariat, for the proletariat. Those who felt cheated out of stimulus checks were forcibly taking from the rich, sending a clear message. To be honest, I am all for it, but that may be due to my disdain for all things finance.
Browsing through r/WallStreetBets, you can find nigh-incomprehensible language ripped straight from right-wing 4chan boards, including ableist slurs, sexual language, and the everpresent shorthand for referring to someone as naive and childish, the consumption of “tendies” (chicken tenders). After spending 5 minutes on the subreddit, it became clear that this is a place of low-culture ideas about the high-culture activity of the stock market. And it’s massive, with 9.1 million members. That’s larger than the total population of New York City.
The huge number of people involved in WSB represents the possibility for further upheaval in the future. Of course, some of that threat is limited since WallStreetBets is far more visible now. However, the visibility of this one subreddit could simply cause a migration to an infinite number of new subreddits, or even to 4chan boards- specifically /biz/, which currently seems to be more dedicated to cryptocurrency and racial slurs than anything else, but has the potential to accommodate a flood of new members from WSB. Despite popular support among many communities for the initial GameStop movement, the thought of a transfer to 4chan is undeniably frightening.
Platforms have power. Certain platforms are built for certain purposes and have stereotypes surrounding them. What do you think when you hear “Twitter post” versus “Instagram post”, to name two mainstream social media sites? The difference between forums is important, and these differences have power. To raise another example of a social media organized economic event, Blackout Day (July 7, 2020) was an economic protest to encourage people to buy only from Black-owned businesses for one day. It was organized primarily over Instagram and Facebook. It received far fewer minutes in media coverage than the Gamestop incident, causing an 0.8% dip in NASDAQ, compared to a 4% drop between January 26th and January 29th of 2021.
The primary purpose of Reddit is to bring together niche communities. Reddit offers its members a place to discuss the things they enjoy in an organized forum. 4chan has a similar purpose, if by all means and in all ways infinitely worse – bringing together niche communities to talk freely about their beliefs, which are most often hateful and bigoted, without moderation. How dangerous could an unmoderated WSB- or a higher populated /biz/- become?
