WallStreetBets Discord Has Been Banned, Subreddit Set to Private [Updated]

The WallStreetBets server has been banned by Discord and the subreddit has now been set to private.

WallStreetBets served banned by Discord

The server was banned on Thursday morning for alleged violations of Community Guidelines.

According to Discord, this included hate speech and the spread of misinformation.

Discord also asserted that the ban was not due to the recent GameStop stock surge, referring to this as “financial fraud.”

Here is the full statement from Discord:

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.

discord’s statement on banning the wall street bets discord server:

discord said it was banned for “continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content” after “multiple warnings” going back for “months” and that it was not related to anything with gamestop or other stocks pic.twitter.com/e3BKHwNJyN

— Ali Breland (@alibreland) January 27, 2021

Subreddit goes private, but then returns

After the ban the r/WallStreetBets subreddit was set to private.

It seems that the group made this decision due to being unable to adhere to Reddit’s content policy due to the exponential amount of users flooding to the subreddit.

“We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit’s content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back,” one message read.

That argument is summed up here: pic.twitter.com/tl5r0LZucj

— Dell Cameron (@dellcam) January 28, 2021

However, it returned after about an hour or so and r/wallstreetbets has once again public. There is now a new message from the mods and the about section now points to the WallStreetBets moderator Twitter account.

A new post shows a moderator saying they tried to address the abuse on Discord server but were limited by the tools available to available to a server with 250,000 people.

The post also says that people are speaking for them on other platforms, such as Twitter.

“People are co-opting our name on twitter… lots of handles with ‘wsb’ and ‘wallstreetbets in them are pretending to speak for us,” the post reads.

“They’re saying things 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.”

How we got here

This news comes off the back of WallStreetBets being firmly in the internet spotlight after sending GameSpot stock through the roof over the past week.

This has resulted in hedge funds that were shorting the stock in losing an enormous amount of money. Melvin Capital finally closed its position on Wednesday at a 100 per cent loss even after receiving cash injections from other hedge funds.

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Other ‘unfavourable’ stock has also seen huge growth as a result of WallStreetBets. This includes Blackberry, Nokia and even the bankrupt Blockbuster video.

If you want more of an explainer on what’s happened with GameStop stock this week, we have one here.

This post has been updated to reflect r/wallstreetbets being made public again.