As a result GME stock price declined (reaching an all-time low of $2.57 on April 3, 2020), leading many hedge funds to short sell the stock-meaning they would profit from its further decrease in price. GameStop (NYSE:GME) is a US video game retailer which was struggling in recent years due to competition from digital distribution services as well as economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The popularity of this forum has steadily increased in recent years and has exploded after the events of the GameStop saga. The hallmarks of WSB are the irreverent jargon and edgy humor used in conversations 10, as well as the gambling attitude of its users who yet seem to give good investment advice 11. The subreddit WSB is a community where users (retail investors but also non-skilled traders who use no-commission mobile apps such as ) discuss trading strategies and share their gains and losses. The forum is organised into various independent subreddits, each dedicated to a specific topic. Reddit is a public discussion website whose users interact with each other by submitting new posts and adding comments to existing posts or comments, thus creating tree-structured conversation threads. Recently an online mass coordination on r/wallstreetbets (WSB), a community of the social media platform Reddit, was able to trigger a short squeeze of GameStop shares with a large impact on financial markets 9. Online social media have revolutionized the way we interact with peers, share information and form opinions 1, 2, giving rise to new large-scale social phenomena: for instance, the spreading of fake news 3, 4, the formation of echo chambers and polarized opinions 5, 6, the organization of collective actions-from the Arab Spring 7 to climate change protests 8. Although the model cannot be validated with available data, it offers a possible and minimal interpretation for the increasingly important phenomenon of self-organized collective actions taking place on social networks. Analytical solutions and model simulations on interaction networks of Reddit users feature a phase transition from heterogeneous to homogeneous opinions as engagement grows, which we qualitatively compare to the sudden hike of GME stock price. Taking inspiration from these early warnings as well as evidence from previous literature, we introduce a model of opinion dynamics where user engagement can trigger a self-reinforcing mechanism leading to the emergence of consensus, which in this particular case is associated to the success of the short squeeze operation. In this work we characterise the structure and time evolution of Reddit conversation data, showing that the occurrence and sentiment of GME-related comments (representing how much users are engaged with GME) increased significantly much before the short squeeze actually took place. As such, it represents a paramount example of collective coordination action on social media, resulting in large-scale consensus formation and significant market impact. The short squeeze of GameStop (GME) shares in mid-January 2021 has been primarily orchestrated by retail investors of the Reddit r/wallstreetbets community.
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