Discord bans r/WallStreetBets as Reddit sub is locked, GameStop stock fell hours later

Reddit’s WallStreetBets community has been under fire in the past week in an ongoing dispute between big-time Wall Street Investors and social media betters. This resulted in the banning of their community on chat app Discord. Reddit has also locked general access to the community as only those invited can access it.

Reddit investors seem to have been dumping their shares ever since.

Stocks of GameStop and AMC dramatically dropped in after-hours trading, shortly after the drama unfolded. The drop was temporal, and the Reddit WallStreetBets community has created a new community on Discord.

Shares of GameStop fell 32% to $218.32 down from $347.51, in after-hours trading late Wednesday. Shares of AMC fell more than 40% to $11.90 per share and closed at $19.90, even though the stock rose more than 301% during the day.

The recent battle between Wall Street Investors and Reddit community’s shown traits of market volatility. An example is seen in the rise of GameStop shares in recent days, analysts say it is a result of quirks in the market and not necessarily actual increased value, as the video game retailer is currently struggling. Analysts said the same about movie theater chain AMC, which announced that it was near bankruptcy late last year.

The Discord ban was also targeted towards obnoxious community members who repeatedly broke the platform’s rules, according to the chat app in a statement. “Today, we decided to remove the server and its owner from Discord for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.” Adding that the ban had nothing to do with financial fraud or stocks between the parties involved.

“The WallStreetBets 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,” a Discord representative told Insider.

The WallStreetBets community originated on Reddit, with its members eventually setting up a group, known as the Server, on Discord. It is a forum where they discuss stock-trading plans and share ideas with each other.

Some moderators of the Reddit community criticized the move, as they saw no tangible reason for the ban.

“We’re suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty,” they wrote in a Reddit post. “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.”

They added that Discord did them “dirty”, expressing displeasure with the move to destroy the 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’s pretty unethical.”

The White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, at a press conference said the situation was under watch, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was part of the team “monitoring the situation.”

“It’s a good reminder, though, that the stock market isn’t the only measure of the health of our economy,” Psaki said. “It doesn’t reflect how middle- and working-class families are doing.”