3/5/2023 0 Comments Vox gamestopHow did you see this coming? Has this sort of thing ever happened before? I spoke to Aral, director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, about the gray area that is large coordinated stock buys and whether the Securities and Exchange Commission can do anything about it. First there was the Capitol riot, fueled by months of lies about election fraud on social media, and then there was this week’s Wall Street meltdown, courtesy of Reddit message-board users who launched a fading retail company’s stock price higher than that of Apple. Five months later, the book might be described as prophetic: This month alone at least two of Aral’s three predictions have come to fruition. But there's curses to those blessings.In September, Sinan Aral published The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health - and How We Must Adapt. "We celebrated all of these voices that had been essentially silenced before. The internet has given the unempowered the possibility of having an international voice, he added. But what's unique about these online movements, Thompson said, is that they've mobilized and linked previously unconnected people together. History has always had groups of people getting together to affect change. They are not on par with women in the gaming industry."Ĭollectively, though, they're a reflection of how a "mob mentality" born on the internet goes mainstream to the point of disruption. "Short sellers are a privileged sector of society. "One is a coordinated misogynist harassment campaign, one is a militant Trumpist loyalist spiritual movement, and one is a networked act via loopholes in a financial system that threatens stable elite money makers," Jack Bratich, associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, told Insider over email. While sharing similarities in structure, these online movements - Gamergate, QAnon, WallStreetBets - are different in outcomes. ![]() Vox's Aja Romano reported earlier this year that KotakuInAction, a key pro-Gamergate Reddit subforum, still had over 123,000 members - up from 96,000 in 2018 - and was contributing to the rise of similarly aggressive alt-right movements online. Gamergate graduated from Reddit into years of real-world harassment campaigns, including reports of thousands of threats against game developer Zoe Quinn and against feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, who eventually went into hiding. But problematic group behavior has plagued the platform for years. Harassment, bullying, and doxxing are against Reddit's platform policies, and communities that "incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability" are subject to be banned. GameStop, he said, is "one more example of how digital culture has the potential of upending the normal means of operations." Reddit is an engine for movements More altruistically, the " March for Science" in 2017, stemming from the subreddit r/MarchForScience, saw thousands demonstrating nationwide to highlight environmental issues.įor better or worse, the internet has allowed people to organize to do all kinds of things they couldn't before, Robert Thompson, trustee professor and director of Syracuse University's Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, told Insider. In the pre-Trump times, the Gamergate fiasco, in which a group organized to pursue the end of feminist criticism of video games, had its own start on a Reddit thread. ![]() In the Trump years, the QAnon conspiracy theory-following cult started gaining mass traction on platforms including Reddit, while "The_Donald" was an influential subreddit even before the election of 2016. This time it was a brief but epic saga that introduced America to the wonders of the "short squeeze," but mass movements are increasingly taking from the front page of the internet to the world beyond screens. Take a lot of anger, give it a place to congregate online, and after enough fomenting, it will spill into the street and markets.īy now, the messaging platform - which declined to comment for this article - has had a years-long history of providing a platform for groups of people organizing their rage before collectively acting in real life. ![]() GameStop wasn't the first " populist uprising" to spread from Reddit into the real world.
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