As share prices of GameStop stock soar, the popular trading Reddit forum WallStreetBets is facing increased scrutiny. Last night the messaging service Discord shut down the subreddit’s Discord server, a short while later the subreddit went private for some time.
The Verge reported yesterday that the popular voice and messaging service Discord had banned the r/WallStreetBets server. Despite the incredible rally of GameStop stock due to WallStreetBets’ influence, Discord did not ban the community’s server for financial manipulation but for “hate speech.”
Discord told The Verge that the server was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.” The Verge alleges that it gained access to the server and confirmed that slurs and offensive language were used by some members of the server.
Discord released a full statement which reads:
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.
A short while after the Discord server was banned, the WallStreetBets subreddit went private for nearly an hour. Moderators later opened the sub and posted a message about the Discord ban and subreddit status which reads:
We have grown to the kind of size we only dreamed of in the time it takes to get a bad nights sleep. We’ve got so many comments and submissions that we can’t possibly even read them all, let alone act on them as moderators. We wrote software to do most of the moderation for us but that software isn’t allowed to read the Reddit new feed fast enough and submit responses, and the admins haven’t given us special access despite asking for it.
We’re suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don’t get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community instead of stepping in with the wrench we may have needed to fix things, especially after we got over 1,000 server boosts. That is pretty unethical.
To add to this, people are co-opting our name on twitter. I won’t mention their accounts, but lots of handles with “wsb” and “wallstreetbets” in them are pretending to speak for us. They’re saying things that we don’t agree with, driving traffic to derivative communities and shitty pixelated merch stores, and generally making it harder for us to define who we are. There’s also too much political bullshit in a community that was never ever political. The only way I want to occupy Wall St is in a suit myself or rent-free in the mind of a blown up short.
That is why I’m throwing my support behind the Twitter handle in general. We need a way to PUBLICLY reach out to the staff of the infrastructure that is failing us so the world can see that we aren’t doing anything wrong here if they don’t respond. We need to be able to respond directly to a reporter that is lying to the world about our clubhouse. We can’t be expected to meet any expectations when we aren’t given the tools we need.
That’s not to say I approve of every message or will even be in the loop for all of them, but it’s clear to me we can’t do nothing and we need a megaphone.
http://twitter.com/wsbmod aka @wsbmod is the only Twitter handle whose statements are directly from some part of the team.
We’ll do our best not to pretend to speak for you, but to try to speak with the volume our name now seems to command to get shit done for us.
Read more about the GameStop stock situation and WallStreetBets at Breitbart News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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