The r/WallStreetBets subreddit, which has the motto “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal,” has been at the centre of a financial trading storm this week as members put money into GameStop—disrupting hedge fund short sellers who were betting the retailer would fail.
Newsweek logged in to the new Discord server for r/WallStreetBets and can confirm that posting appears to have resumed at full throttle as members discuss investments.
Discord lets users maintain their own communities and communicate using voice calls, video calls and text, alongside private and public chat rooms. For now, it appears to be Ground Zero of r/WallStreetBets coordination and planning, with some members turning their attention to other companies, including Nokia and AMC.
As r/WallStreetBets gained widespread attention this week, Discord said in a statement on Wednesday that its server was being removed following repeated warnings.
A Discord spokesperson said: “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.”
Discord added: “To be clear, we did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks. We are monitoring this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal activities will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.”
Discord has been contacted for comment by Newsweek.
As reported by The Verge, the r/WallStreetBets subreddit went entirely offline for roughly an hour on Wednesday, taken down by moderators who later acknowledged Discord’s ban.
After the subreddit was restored, moderators wrote: “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.”
The post added: “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.”
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Wednesday that it was “actively monitoring” the market volatility amid the GameStop surge, Bloomberg reported.
