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Discord Bans the r/WallStreetBets Server As Subreddit Goes Private (theverge.com) 194

According to The Verge, Discord has banned the r/WallStreetBets server for allowing "hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings." It did not ban the server for financial fraud. We have also learned that Reddit's WallStreetBets subreddit has been set to private. Here is Discord's full statement: The server has been on our Trust & Safety team's radar for some time due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines, including hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation. Over the past few months, we have issued multiple warnings to the server admin.

Today, we decided to remove the server and its owner from Discord for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.

To be clear, we did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks. Discord welcomes a broad variety of personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.
UPDATE: Reddit says the subreddit's moderators were the ones to make it private. According to The Verge's Dieter Bohn, the mods now say that "We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back."

UPDATE #2: r/WallStreetBets is back!

Stories to help you get caught up:
Former SEC Chairman Calls For an Agency Investigation Into Online Stock Trading Platforms
AMC Spikes 260% as Day Traders Ignite Shorted Stocks like GameStop, BlackBerry, and Bed Bath & Beyond
GameStop Jumps After Hours As Elon Musk Tweets Out Reddit Board That's Hyping Stock
GameStop Stock Jumps To New Record
Gaming the System: How GameStop Stock Surged 1,500% In Nine Months
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Discord Bans the r/WallStreetBets Server As Subreddit Goes Private

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:06PM (#60999262)

    Big Money can influence Big Tech. Did you really think censorship would stop with Trump supporters?

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by fatwilbur ( 1098563 )
      I'm sure we'll see the useful idiots come out to say "but this is a private company it can't be censorship!!"

      At what point, when the decisions to censure are so consistent and demonstrative of collusion across multiple major media companies, and all against one side of the political spectrum, do you call that de-facto state censorship? The political left is leading us straight to hell because I suppose the end justifies any means lately.
    • by Zekolas ( 1029166 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @08:25PM (#60999530)
      except that is not really what happened , I mod /r/investing we get a bunch of cross over and the mods talk alot. There was an influx of bots spamming stocks and what ever, reddit asked them to go private so they could stop the spamming (it was causing stress to their servers) and see if they could stop the bot attack Note this happens pretty frequently on WSB, like once every few months . Its back up now
    • Censorship? It's the same reason as with Trump disciples - do not violate the terms of service. It is your right to be an asshat, but you do not have the right to be an asshat on someone else's server against their wishes. This is not a political issue, it's an issue with following the rules set up by the owner of the service being used.

    • This is all this is. As soon as WSB started fucking with some nobody's stocks in a perfectly legal way, they were immediately attacked from all angles.

  • Financial fraud? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:12PM (#60999278)

    There isn't financial fraud, is anyone being misled and told Gamestop is going to magically make billions of dollars in revenue?

    • by bidule ( 173941 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:23PM (#60999328) Homepage

      From what I read they're taking advantage of too many shorts. Some investors were betting the price would go down and sold future stock they don't have. Overall, they have to buy and return more stock than are available.

      So the actual value of Gamestop has nothing to do with this.

      • That shouldn't be allowed to happen, because when you try to short a stock, your broker has to go out and find shares to be borrowed. A lot of times brokers will say they can't find shares to short and you can't short it.
        • Of you look at the short interest, you can see there is more short interest than should be possible under those circumstances
        • What do you mean allowed? It just means there were a lot of people offering up shorts.
        • by Ed Tice ( 3732157 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @11:13PM (#61000014)
          This is very unlikely in modern markets. The normal process is that you execute the short and *then* the broker goes out and finds the shares. If they can't find any, its a "failure to deliver" and they can issue IOUs. Doing it intentionally is not allowed ("strategic failure to deliver) but it happens unintentionally all the time. But this doesn't happen because there are always shares to borrow with everything being held electronically. As soon as borrowed shares are sold to a new owner, they can often be shorted again and you can end up with very high short interest (as exhibited by gamestop)
        • Re:Financial fraud? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by LenKagetsu ( 6196102 ) on Thursday January 28, 2021 @06:53AM (#61000692)

          These are naked shorts which is exactly what you described. They are illegal, and not only are they illegal but you'll be on the hook for an absolute fortune if something like this happens. It's corruption in plain view.

      • Shorters are well capable of driving a company into the ground. That subreddit group did a good thing saving a decent company from nasty parasites. Of course shouldn't call them parasites, that would be hatespeech. Anti hatespeech rules work perfectly for you when you are evil and powerful.

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:24PM (#60999332) Homepage

      No this is much funnier. They were taught about a rather scummy way of playing the USA specific share market. If you pay attention, you can see the scams being run by the banksters, they are not that good or that smart, the system is corrupt. Well, rather like surfing a wave, you can surf the corruption of the USA stock market, you know you bet along with their scummy stock manipulations, you will make money as long as you know how to do your research and pick up on those stock manipulations, when to catch that wave and when to bail out.

      It is really ick, well, apparently they found another way which is really rather fun. They picked up on one, that was artificially shorting, forcing drops in share price, ganged up on it and JUST FUCKED IT RIGHT OVER. The actual criminal act was already occurring, a corrupt SEC was letting it occur and along came 4Chan and fucked it over. They prevented a crime and made money doing it, great job guys, you should be damn proud, FUCK EM.

      • The actual criminal act was already occurring, a corrupt SEC was letting it occur

        What was the crime?

      • Vigilante justice is an oxymoron. By getting revenge on some traders they can end up hurting others. The free market would normally say that GameStop should fail, instead this silly trading game is propping them up artificially, which means competitors will be hurt. And this is happening with several companies, a lot of them may collapse sooner than expected once the prices plummets back down. Some people may have honestly wanted to short GameStop, it's clearly a failing business model, and they got screw

        • Re:Financial fraud? (Score:5, Informative)

          by N1AK ( 864906 ) on Thursday January 28, 2021 @04:42AM (#61000508) Homepage
          This is an incorrect summary. The free market is what you are seeing here; some large corporations were attempting to make a considerable profit by accelerating GameStop's failure (and ensuring no chance of a turnaround) by shorting large amounts of GameStop stock. It's very clear that the shorts intentions was to devalue GME, not that they were simply intending to benefit from the gradual trend of devaluation that was likely to occur naturally. Other players realised that the large volume of shorts made it possible to increase the share price by buying shares to restrict availability to shorters forcing them to pay vastly more. Both groups were buying shares based on the impact buying shares with the intention of making a quick profit by causing the share price to change.
        • by t0rkm3 ( 666910 )

          Yes. Yes they are heroes.

          When a system has shown that it CANNOT be changed through political means, it must be opposed in other means. This opposition used the system's unfair practices and convolutions against itself to the detriment of people who harvest wealth and sow suffering among people all over the world. They farm this pain and death upon people to increase liquidity by increasing the rate at which money moves through the market so that they can capture a percentage.

          They are getting their justice b

  • by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:16PM (#60999298) Journal

    I corresponded with somebody who claims to be a 3-year redditor who used the sub, and he can't get in. Assuming it's true, it's really "private" in the way that an empty lot in Vegas that used to be a casino is a "private club".

    Without today's daily posting from /u/DeepFuckingValue we're in the dark as to his notional value at closing (likely far lower tomorrow). It was the community that drove this. Without all their rockets and diamond+hand emoji to encourage holders, this is going to collapse soon. We're all in the dark about the leader's position now. Fear lives in darkness, and fear sells.

    I'm still just eating my popcorn, but I'll say this: no $1000 Friday that they were all looking for.

    • by ooshna ( 1654125 )

      I can't even submit a request to join without getting 500 and 503 errors. Something seems really off about that since the rest of reddit runs fine.

    • by ghoul ( 157158 )
      Keep in mind now there are calls available all the way upto 400. So Market Makers think there is a market for calls at 400.
    • You can visit /u/DeepFuckingValue's user page and get his daily update [reddit.com] directly, and it's actually on WSB so apparently they're not entirely full of crap about the "private" thing. It looks like they just disabled the portal as it were, and still allow you to get to interesting posts if you know the URL.

      • OK, and now you can get to the main page too, although it loads slowly so it looks like they were genuinely handling what amounts to a DoS, and not censoring.

        I'd say give 'em a break, but the days of the Slashdot effect are long gone. Sigh... remember that? Now it's the WSB/RH effect I suppose.

      • Thanks!
      • His current position is $47million.
    • It ended with Melvin bailed. At that point the main purpose was over and all that was left were people buying it at 300 who stupidly thought there was a compelling reason for it to go higher rather than back to 20 where it belongs.

      Melvin bailed before the opening bell, folks had all day to be 'not stupid', anybody holding now is in for a rude surprise. It's down 16% in after hours trading and will be down a lot at the bell tomorrow. People will discover that selling at $200 is only an option if you fi

      • There's also no limit to how high it can go. Melvin didn't realize the loss to wipe out the short position ... the shorts are still out there and have obviously used aftermarket trading to try to do a little momentum ignition to get into the money fast. Will people take the bait? Probably, maybe not.

        This is a zero sum game ponzi and a lot of people will get hurt, but it can squeeze higher and ruin a lot of shorters along the way too.

      • I'm given to understand that another crop of shorts came in after Melvin because "hey, now that Melvin's out it's got nowhere to go but down", and then they too were lured in to the squeeze.

        It would be pretty funny if major institutions were forced to ban shorting in a few particular stocks in order to protect the shorts from themselves. That's the same rationale that's always used to prevent small investors from doing various things. They'd get a giant "I told you so", from the WSB/RH crowd.

    • WSB goes private for a bit to clean up bot posting every few months so this isn't usual; there were so many bots spamming and upvoting it was causing stress to reddit servers and they had to take it down to try to stop the spamming/bots they sent a message to the mods of /r/investing as a warming and we had to lock out sub too but didn't go fully private
    • by sinij ( 911942 )

      Fear lives in darkness.

      You thought that peasants would be allowed to make that kind of money at the expense of Wall Street?

  • Edgelords (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:20PM (#60999316) Journal

    If the gentleman penning open letters to the media about dumpster handjobs quoted in the previous Slashdot article [slashdot.org] is any indication... The board was at least as full of edgelords engaging in stick-it-to-the-man posturing (and simultaneously chasing social-media celebrity) as it was investment discussion.

    So, it doesn't surprise me that there would be "hateful and discriminatory content" there. Does anyone know what was actually being posted there, or is Discord just using this as a pretext? (Strong, loud assertions need not reply - I want the original material.) It's hard to tell, because the single thing I've seen to represent "WallStreetBets" was such a shitshow of a rant.

    I fully expect this to get modded down [slashdot.org] like my comment on the previous article, but maybe if I post fast enough someone with actual information might come through and reply .... I can dream, right? ... It'd be like 2002 Slashdot. Come on, we can make it happen.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by MattMann ( 102516 )

      such a weird post, you're basically saying that everybody owes you, somebody who is completely out of the loop, an explanation so you can pontificate on it? dude, nobody cares what you think about this, it's best if you remain uninformed.

    • I visited it occasionally. It's a wild sub-reddit full of crazy people... they call each other autistic as a compliment, and I would say the general attitude is "manic"... but I wouldn't call their brand of insanity "hateful and discriminatory". It's more funny than anything. I'd hate to see it go.
    • by ooshna ( 1654125 )

      They regularly call themselves autists and retards. Saying things like 'I know I'm an autist but I'm riding this to the moon with the rest of you retards'. No real hate speech at all just admitting they are yoloing money and could lose everything for the memes.

      • Re:Edgelords (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fatwilbur ( 1098563 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @08:27PM (#60999536)
        Anyone who raises issue with such "offensive" words being used in that manner is for all intents (and all pun intended), a retard. People, and more often but not always mean more than women, use derogatory terms in such conversations actually as a sign of camaraderie. Literally anyone who's had at least one close friend group in history knows this. There was a recent story in Canadian media about someone being fired for calling someone a "fag" when their private group WhatsApp conversation. He noted in the subsequent investigation (where his employer was found to have wrongly fired him), that it clearly was not meant as a hateful term nor that he hates gay people. Anyone who read it that way, I repeat, is a retard.

        I call my closest friends names (in private) that duh, nobody sane would ever say to a random person on the street. Even my wife, quite the professional, calls her closest women friends "bitches" regularly. This is normal human behaviour, and if they see it as wrong, they've clearly never had any close friends, which speaks to how much consideration their opinion should be given.
        • Re:Edgelords (Score:4, Interesting)

          by hjf ( 703092 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @11:15PM (#61000020) Homepage

          recently a uruguayan football player was suspended by FIFA for saying "gracias, negrito" ("thanks my nig*er") to a friend.

          FIFA, the corrupt organization that helps launder billions every year and pretends not to see the slave work in Qatar, suspends a player for using a friendly term with a friend.
          (also i had to censor this comment because slashdot decided the N word is "lame")

    • So I still have a page open that hasn't been wiped yet from their thread today "gme:Gamestonk Thread" None of the following is my own words, and I make no claims of its value to anyone in praticular, but it all did appear on /rwallstreet bets earlier today, exactly as below in this order as best I can type. The typical tone for the sub tends to have less actual conversation and more calling each other autists and retards with tons of rocket emoji from what i've seen but this is fairly representative of wh
    • You are absolutely correct. I read through the board after hearing about it in the same story as you, and largely came to the same conclusion. It is hardly different from any internet forum of the same anonymous nature.

      It is both baffling and concerning how the stated conclusions are drawn. The least sinister explanation I can come up with is they've hired some recent Communications grads to do reviews as part of the "Trust & Safety team", who have no previous exposure to internet forums and never
  • by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:31PM (#60999348)

    How do they decide this? Do they do a poll of their staff?

    Does hateful meant that the content might upset someone who reads it? Or it makes them feel bad?

    Does discriminatory mean that people who don't understand the subject matter feel as if they're being discriminated against?

  • by Jarwulf ( 530523 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:42PM (#60999378)
    A website founded on the ideals of the little guy sticking it to the Big Tech Man and his Corporate Bankster overlords And now we have many of the very same hippies. The same groups who used to cry incessantly about Microsoft and Goldman Sachs and the White House back in the day and how they were going to roll over everybody, gleefully jumping on the shoulder of Google/Reddit/Goldman Sachs/White House et al as they actually start doing it.
  • by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:46PM (#60999392)
    CNBC anchors paid by Hedge funds to run the forum down kept saying where are the fundamentals which justify the price of Gamestop. The fundamentals at play are not those of Gamestop, the fundamentals at play are how much money Citadel has and is willing to lose backing this short . The fundamental analysis was done that Citadel would not lose more than 2 billion or resort to calling in favors from the Biden administration (whose campaign they donated to generously). Bsed on this fundamentals analysis a decision was made to squeeze this over shorted stock and bring back sanity to the market. However it seems the fundamentals analysis was wrong. Citadel is willing to lose upto 10 billion dollars and call in CNBC, Discord,Reddit , SEC, NASDAQ and all the other people they have on their payroll to break this short squeeze and set it in stone once and for all - only big guys can make money in the stock market. (And Pelosi . Dont forget Pelosi's TSLA calls)
  • by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:55PM (#60999436)

    As I understand it, what happened is this:
    1.Some big wall street investment companies borrowed a bunch of shares in various companies and then sold them at price X expecting the price to fall to the point where they could buy them back at a price lower than X and return them to the borrowers. Perfectly legal short selling.

    2.A bunch of people on Reddit looked at public information (information available to everyone trading on the stock market) and noticed that for certain companies, the total amount of stock that had been borrowed by the short sellers was close to (or in some cases above) the total amount of stock that was being traded on the market. Perfectly legal (since no information that wasn't already public was used)

    3.These same Reddit people decided collectively to buy all the shares in these companies they could get their hands on. (its also not illegal for some random person on Reddit to decide to buy shares in a certain company if that's what they want to do. Or even for multiple people to decide collectively to buy shares in a certain company)

    4.The people who bought these shares are now sitting on them and refusing to sell (also perfectly legal as far as I know, the shares were acquired legally and there is no law I know of that forces someone to sell their legally acquired shares)

    Where is the illegality here? Is there some law I don't know about regarding collusion? Was inside information used somewhere? Did someone provide investment advice in a way that breaks the law? Or is this just Wall Street saying that its illegal and hoping the SEC and regulators can find something to back them up (or if necessary, pass new rules around this)

    • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:59PM (#60999458)

      Your #1 is only 1/10th the story, the shorting hedge funds were so very greedy, sure of their success as they beat down GME stock, they shorted more stock than were in existence and doubled and tripled down with more margin than they had to cover their short positions. In short (pun intended) their greed made them do something extremely unprofessional, risky, incompetent... and they were majorly screwed over.

      No illegality, and of course those fund managers have been manipulating for decades, targeting and driving down values of productive companies, etc. They cooked their own goose this time.

      • Actually, naked shorting has been illegal since 2008. It's still possible to do it, but it's basically against the law. Anyone that busts a hedge fund who is naked shorting a stock that is already trading near its lows (which is really stupid) deserves whatever money they can extract from the hedge fund morons.

    • The SEC believes this is a pump and dump. There are 70M shares of GME outstanding. The volume has been significantly over that for 2 weeks now. If the shares are completely cycling multiple times a day, then where's the squeeze?
      • Your last sentence was non sequitur. The volume tells you nothing about the number of shares being traded.

        In the limit case a single share can create that volume at the speeds modern exchanges operate at.

  • This will stop the bleeding, and by the time the people making the cuts reorganize there'll be new regulations to stop them from pulling this again.

    As long as we let the upper class run rampant the little guy will never win. It's time to regulate. They spend a few billion a year convincing us that we shouldn't want regulation ourselves because we'd lose all these opportunities and when we use them they take them away.

    Regulate. Everyone. Make Wall Street work for America, not the other way around.
  • by mpoulton ( 689851 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @08:07PM (#60999488)

    The subreddit is back up. The content is intact. It got slammed with bots this afternoon, and a flood of shitposting (which is really saying something over there). The sub gained a million users overnight and is the epicenter of a historic event, so there's a lot to handle. The GME short squeeze is ongoing and the sentiment on the sub seems to be to hold or buy, and to extend puts ("WE LIKE THE STOCK!" is the mantra over there). Although some of the short sellers (apparently including Melvin) seem to be claiming that they've covered already, I'm not convinced - and it doesn't look like others are convinced either. GME may or may not still be shorted beyond the float, it seems. At this point it's hard to tell if the price is being driven more by the short squeeze or simply by insane tulip-like buying pressure. I wouldn't even venture a guess on that.

    It'll almost certainly crash, but the saving grace here is that everyone involved seems completely aware of this inevitable fate and accepts the risk. I have not jumped in.

  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @08:44PM (#60999602)

    Like, based on actual evidence.
    Insert any scientific statistical evidence you know here. And insert treating people differently, based on that, after it.

    (I mean what else but discriminstion are all those laws along the pattern "All people like pattern X are not allowed because some people like pattern X did bad thingY." Example: Banning all bicycle riders from pedestrian areas because some drive like idiots.... Most of those riders will get harmed evem though they never did anything wrong, and never would.)

    Also, I don't think it is reasonable, to expect people to use scientific evidence each time, and discriminate in ways that are not consistent with their personal experience. It *is* their reality, after all.

    And ... also ... what if I speak hateful about Hitler? Because: Are you banning hate or not? Or are you not actually caring about hate itself, but about emotions that do not align with your ideologies,... while loving that opportunity for convenient virtue signaling?

    TL;DR: This whole thing is ridicuous from the ground up. Everythinf about it and all "sides". Nobody thinks about it for five damn philosophical minutes. Nobody seems even mentally capable of it. It is a whole host od social memetic cancer. And unless people acrualy get a clue, nobody is qualified to even talk about this.

  • by Proudrooster ( 580120 ) on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @09:54PM (#60999838) Homepage

    NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE

    First off, Wallstreet bets is back, WSB booted the million bots that signed up today and started spamming other ticker symbols to try and confuse everyone.

    As for me, I bought and sold and bought and sold and am now holding for the short squeeze.

    Will the price skyrocket? Who knows?

    Is this fun? Oh Yeah!

    Is this history in the making? Oh Yeah!

    Is this the beginning of the little guy finally running with the Wallstreet Big Boys? (A hesitant maybe)

    Are the wrong people losing money for the right reasons? (Oh yeah) Note: The institutional investors and hedge funds should never lose money and if they do, they should receive and immediate bailout from taxpayers or deficit spending. They will either get a bailout or some new SEC rules will appear to try and stop the little guy from winning again when the big guys do a deal that is absolutely ludicrous.

    Will Game Stop live to fight another day? (I think so)

    Is the stock market a corrupt casino? (I am pretty sure it is, just ask the good fellows who crashed the market in 2008 with complex derivatives and took down the housing market and caused a recession?)

    Will there be a movie? (If the stock hits $1000, there will be a movie)

    Will this be studied by future economic students? (Yes)

    Will there be a song written about this? (I hope so to commemorate this event)

    The dust probably won't settle until next week but it should be an interesting ride.
    3 2 1

  • by ledow ( 319597 ) on Thursday January 28, 2021 @05:06AM (#61000532) Homepage

    Nobody going to mention the movie Trading Places?

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