GME and the Corruption of Democracy

So I’m not always necessarily the best about writing about things of “Great Importance,” but I’m gonna give it a shot.

Unless you live under a rock you’ve surely heard about r/wallstreetbets and GME.
For a few weeks a few self-proclaimed “retards” bought and held a ‘meme stock’ GME (GameStop) much to the ire of a hedge fund, Melvin.
For weeks the sub was filled with jubiousness! A collective group of people had stuck it to the man.
Melvin lost billions of dollars while “the army of retards” lovingly remembered Harambe and talked of riding the GME stock to the moon. For one sweet moment it felt like democracy in action!! The people had spoken and “they liked the stock.”

What followed was a string of corruption that turned the tables on the first truly democratic experience that I’ve ever witnessed in my 26 years on this Earth.
The first thing that happened was the media would take stories from established members of the financial community and run them without any fact checking whatsoever. Article after article popped up about how a “closed group of private buyers were unfairly manipulating the market.” Again none of this was fact checked whatsoever so when other people would run a similar story the only sources they posted were from other publications who didn’t have any works cited. The astounding lack of sources boggled the brains of r/WSB: an open public forum made up of individuals was being mis-represented by national publications.
The same people who laughed at Trumpies and their constant claims of “fake news” were now re-evaluating whether those statements were actually true.
After the misinformation and character assaults didn’t do their intended job of quelling the GME uprising, the institution launched their next attack.

Robinhood which billed itself as a way of investing for the “common man” stopped the trading of GME. They claimed it was because the trading was too tumultous & volatile and they were worried that they would not be able to cover all of the positions of buyers so they halted trading. Imagine the (lack of) surprise when it was found out that Citadel, a well-known Wall Street hedge fund was one of Robinhood’s largest “investors.” Rumors of Citadel leveraging it’s weight and money to stop the democratizing of the stock market began to make the rounds of r/WSB. Robinhood began receiving 1’s in the app store and Google for supposedly siding with it’s investors despite billing itself as a tool for the common man. Google, Apple, and many other review systems have auto-mod features that trigger if they believe people are trying to brigade businesses by leaving negative reviews that aren’t “deserved.” Much of the outrage that was levelled at Robinhood during the time just disappeared into the ether. It had absolutely no effect on their standing and at the time of writing this (2/10/2021) they still have a 4.0 through the Apple App Store despite having thousands upon thousands of 1 star reviews.

After Robinhood stopped all trading of GME the hedgies and media moguls lodged another attack at the “retards” of r/WSB. In this attack they convinced people that the people of r/WSB were over GME and were now moving onto Silver (SLV). r/WSB was livid and their posts rebuking Silver and the hedge funds trying to shift away interest from their beloved GME were plastered all over the front page of Reddit (where the most popular posts live). Despite the fact that the vocal majority was NOT INTERESTED IN SILVER, national publications still ran articles saying the opposite with absolutely no sources cited. Many of the authors would say that they had skimmed r/WSB and somehow their skimming made them qualified enough to write about them (again, with no sources) in the national news.
This assault also didn’t work and the price of GME kept rising as more people jumped aboard the diamond hand train to the moon.

When villifying the common man via financial publications didn’t have quite the effect they were going for they started infiltrating the subreddit. Accounts that were 10 minutes or 2 days old were in the comments sowing discontent and making people question their positions. Redditors have been around the block quite a few times, so the bot attacks only worked to a point as people could easily see the age, post and comment history of these accounts. People with a bit more experience would point these “hedge fund interns” out which provided some insulation from these attacks. The hedgies soon wised up and began buying old accounts that perhaps would give them a bit more clout in the conversation, but the comment and post history would still be pretty damning considering they were copying and pasting fear mongering ideas in the hopes of turning some “diamond hands” that hold into “paper hands” that sell. This didn’t seem to have a high enough success rate so soon the hedgies turned to the mods.
(This part needs a tiny bit of back story to explain so please follow this link and you can see that r/WallStreetBets had already had an issue with a rogue mod taking over the sub and using it to gain clout. This mod was banned, but some of the people that he promoted to mod during his reign of terror still had access.)
One of these mods smelled money in the water and as talks of a movie deal began to unfold this mod began deleting important posts about GME and banning moderators who had actively played a role in building r/WSB to what it was. One beloved mod u/zjz who is well-known for being a very positive influence in the community was booted. He began whistleblowing by sharing receipts and posts that acknowledged the hostile takeover and people began conglomerating in his community that he had built to test bots aptly named r/wallstreetsbettest.
While the mods went on a trail of destruction promoting accounts to mod that had only had accounts for 1 or 2 days and deleting any post that didn’t fit the idea of r/WSB they wanted to curate the orignal retards of the sub began getting wise and begged the actual adminstration of Reddit to step in.
Gain posts from people who sold their GME when it was at it’s highest were now at the front page taunting people who were still holding as the stock continued to drop. Diamond hands turned to paper hands as the community shouting HOLD!!! was silenced by mods who likely had personal financial motivations for doing so.
Reddit did eventually step in, but the damage was done. The rogue mods were blocked and banned, but u/zjz was still not allowed to come back to his rightful place.

As r/WSB reeled from all of the changes larger private investors pulled out to contain their losses as the people of r/WSB were trying to distinguish between the mixed signals their beloved subreddit was giving them.
During all of this time the SEC stepped in and did NOTHING except for ask the involved parties to testify before Senate. They did nothing when blatant misinformation was being spread. They did nothing when hedge funds made it hard for regular people to trade. They just left the little retards to fend for themselves.
As if all of this weren’t enough Robinhood comes back from all of this saying that they’ve got 3.4 billion dollars from investors while all of the frenzy was going on and they were going to use it to repair the image and try to gain some of their customers back, but 3.4 billion would have been enough to cover all of the trades that they claimed they couldn’t afford.

I think it’s about time we start calling a spade, a spade. Corporations and institutions having more access to the government than the constituents should be considered corruption. Politicians are accepting bribes to work against the interest of American people, but because we have an official name for it, it doesn’t seem that bad.
Again the first act of true democracy I have experienced in my lifetime was quelled by misinformation and inaction sponsored by the powers that be. It’s so disappointing to witness, but it’s just another spectacle that shows the true colors of the system and how it has always been built for and by wealthy, white landowners.