TLDR for all 6 parts: The Fediverse is a tool that gives us the power to speak freely about crucially important information relevant to the interests of our investment that would be censored elsewhere. As time goes on, this value of this tool will only become more self-evident.

Hello everyone,

The mission to DRS GME is unfinished, and in order to effectively continue the mission we require a place on the internet where we are able to openly discuss certain topics of information that would otherwise be censored on centralized platforms such as Reddit.

Much of what is in this post contains information that is already well known by DRS'd shareholders of GME, but I felt compelled to write this in this form of narrative for the sake of having a historical account of events that have transpired that have led us here. This account of events should demonstrate the necessity of the creation and continued existence of fediverse instances such as this Lemmy instance.

Introduction: The issue with incumbent social media platforms: centralized authority

Big popular social media platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and Facebook are all for-profit entities that exist primarily to serve the for-profit interests of the owners. It also gives the owners great power over the sharing of information on the internet. Centralized companies such as these can be targeted and influenced at the source of control by external entities. The investor / owners might say they want certain topics of conversation to be not permitted (censored). The investor / owners might want certain topics of conversation greatly amplified, to push propaganda for some self-interested benefit. All power and control of the platform is centralized into a single authority, so for external powerful and influential players, all that needs to be done to spread their influence into the platform and its many millions of users is to make an arrangement with that central authority.

Any community that exists on these platforms is subject to the control of the centralized authority. If the centralized authority deems that a community is problematic, they will eliminate it. We have witnessed many cases of this, most notably with the recent elimination of the r/DRSyourGME subreddit.

Some might say: "But if you aren't doing anything wrong, then you should have no concern that your community will be eliminated, and therefore if you are concerned about having your community eliminated, maybe your community is just a bad community with a bad mission and you deserved to be eliminated."

The issue of course is that: who gets to decide what is good and what is bad? On these centralized platforms, the answer of course is the centralized authority. They can decide for any reason at all that a particular community is against the interests of them, the centralized authority, and they can exercise their power to eliminate that community. And if there is an external party that has influence into the centralized authority, then the external party can exert their influence and be part of the decision making process of what is considered to be good or bad, for the ultimate purpose of advancing their interests.

Corruption of centralized social media platforms

So, if there is some external entity that is not the centralized authority of a social media platform that sees a particular community on that platform as a competitor or a threat to them, how would they go about getting rid of or otherwise exerting influence over that threatening community? They are not the centralized authority, so they don't possess the ability themselves. But, if they are sufficiently powerful or wealthy, they can use their power or wealth and approach the centralized entity with a deal of money in exchange for influence.

For example, as of 2021, Fidelity is one of the major investor / owners of Reddit.

"In an interview with The New York Times, co-founder Steve Huffman notes that it hadn’t planned to raise another round so quickly, but ultimately couldn’t turn down what Fidelity was offering. He adds that the funding will also factor into Reddit’s eventual IPO plans." source

I wonder what benefits Fidelity received out of this arrangement? Did they do this out of the goodness of their heart because they really care about the ability of community participants to have good discussions on Reddit, or was it because they wanted some degree of influence and control over the kinds of discussions that happen on Reddit?

What if there was a particular community of people (investors of GameStop) that all happened to use a particular platform (Reddit), and that this community was utilizing that platform to uncover some of Wall Street's deepest darkest secrets which naturally include extensive fraud and criminality?

Hypothetically, what if this situation was actually a threat to some entity because that entity had some secrets of their own that they did not want to be uncovered, and so they approached Fidelity to express to them their concerns that those pesky GameStop investors on Reddit were starting to get too close to the dangerous truth and that maybe something needed to be done about this?

GameStop: the single security exhibiting idiosyncratic risk

It is known that GameStop Corp (stock ticker: GME) was referred to as a "single security exhibiting idiosyncratic risk" in the 2021 Annual Financial Stability Report published by the Financial Stability Oversight Council. Superstonk discussion of this

Risk to who and to what? In essence, to Wall Street's whole rigged game that stems from the opacity of the DTC. It was the risk of exposing the rampant unfettered systemic fraudulent behavior of naked short selling and failures to deliver that is being perpetrated against legitimate but vulnerable victim companies that are publicly traded on stock exchanges.

During the January 2021 GameStop sneeze, powerful Wall Street incumbents took dramatic actions to prevent any further purchasing of GameStop stock, which had the desired effect of killing momentum and prematurely ending the event.

Subsequently, investors of GameStop searched tirelessly for new information in the unending quest to unravel the mystery of the systemic fraud that had been perpetrated against their company. Initially, conversations about GameStop on Reddit were primarily located in the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, but over time it became clear that this subreddit was not a suitable place for conversations specifically about GameStop, and several new subreddits were formed for this purpose. The r/Superstonk subreddit eventually emerged as the primary and largest GME-centric subreddit.

The community of GameStop investors eventually discovered the work of industry expert Dr. Susanne Trimbath, author of the book Naked, Short and Greedy: Wall Street's Failure to Deliver. Information from this book, and from an interview with her, among other sources of information, began to lead to some answers.

An understanding began to form that the fraudulent behaviors of naked short selling and failures to deliver created a situation where there were actually many more shares of GME in the system than the official number of shares that were issued by the company. The implications of this discovery are hard to overstate. How could this really be the case? Any evidence that might prove this to be true was not publicly available.

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[–] bibic_jr@lemmy.whynotdrs.org 5 points 1 year ago

What a way to kick off the DD for this community!