On Thursday, the meteoric rise in the price of the video-game retailer’s shares finally crested, after Robinhood and other apps favored by day traders forbade their users from buying stock in GameStop, AMC Entertainment, and other firms favored by Reddit’s WallStreetBets message board. Open the Future℠.The rally in GameStop either can’t stop or won’t stop (as of this writing at least). Hosch & Morris, PLLC is a boutique law firm dedicated to data privacy and protection, cybersecurity, the Internet and technology. We suggest that if anger can find not just expression, but automated amplification on these online platforms because of how they are engineered – and especially if they want to claim a portion of credit for amplifying constructive and beneficial messages – then the platforms must bear at least a portion of responsibility, for the actions of the online “mobs” they thereby help to create. However different Capitol insurrectionists may be from GameStop anti-institutionalists and/or speculators, and irrespective of the merits of the messages, in each instance it was the platforms’ algorithms that made those calls to action louder. We are seeing algorithmic amplification result in crowds of people becoming radicalized, often unexpectedly and all-too-often irrationally. The large platforms-Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Parler, or others-have become places which automatically amplify emotional speakers and content, including angry speakers and false content. The discussion that began on Reddit touched an exposed nerve, reaching through its amplification an audience that was already there, waiting.ģ.
There is an anger “out there” which is searching not only for expression, but for action.
Here, as earlier in January, like-minded users leveraged social media to coordinate action.Ģ. Even without resort to electronic trickery, social media is a powerful amplifier, whose automatic tools can be leveraged for a multitude of purposes. We suggest three topics to consider thoughtfully:ġ. This is January’s second astonishing event driven largely by commentators on social media and powerful algorithms that amplify their messages. You can read the details by clicking on the following links: (GameStop started the year at $18.84 per share at one point it traded at $483, up almost 2,500%.) GameStop’s price then sky-rocketed, and the hedge funds shorting GameStop and other stocks, like AMC, Nokia and Blackberry, lost billions almost overnight. On Tuesday, as the value of GameStop shares increased, Elon Musk tweeted a link to r/WallStreetBets, along with one word: “Gamestonk!!” (on social media, the term “stonk” is used colloquially to mean “stock”). Bolstered by upvotes and comments in the WallStreetBets Reddit forum ( ), and a related Discord hang-out group ( ) (“Discord” is comparable to a live version of Reddit where users can interact on topics of choice in real-time), the sudden price increase put severe pressure on hedge funds shorting the stock. (In contrast, Twitter has sharp limits on how many characters a message can include, and its algorithms sort content based on relevance, engagement, recency and other factors, including whom people “follow” and what posts they “like.”)įor a few weeks, a Reddit user, who goes by the name “Roaring Kitty” on some social media accounts, has inspired a swarm of retail investors to drive up the stock price of GameStop.
For example, within the minutes that a story is posted, the Reddit story algorithm calculates and places a value on the number of upvotes, downvotes and comments it receives, and then allows the amount of “engagement” reflected by the votes to drive the prominence of the story, making it “hot” or not. Reddit algorithms rank posts or “stories” according to the number of votes they receive within a certain time. Discussions are grouped by topic and subtopics, which registered members can create and which allow expansive discussion. Reddit is a discussion board, similar in some ways to the old bulletin boards of yesteryear but updated. What is Reddit, and how is it different from Twitter? This week, it’s about Reddit, Roaring Kitty and GameStop, along our view that platforms, like Reddit and Twitter, are fuel-injecting the recent controversies.
This week’s big news isn’t about any of those platforms. Algorithms, GameStop and Roaring Kitty.Last week, we wrote about dramatic, recent moves by Twitter, permanently suspending former President Trump’s account Facebook, also suspending it, and referring the request for reinstatement to its Oversight Review Board and AWS, kicking Parler off of its platform.