Fight The Man: What GameStop’s surge says about online mobs

The Reddit-based investors used the chat platform Discord to fire each other up and the trading app Robinhood to buy shares with a few clicks on their smartphones. They soon found a shared enemy in hedge fund managers who tried to short the stock, encouraging each other to keep buying GameStop and push it ever higher – ‘to the moon’. — Bloomberg

It’s a fable for our times: Small-time investors band together to take down greedy Wall Street hedge funds using the stock of a troubled video-game store.

But the revolt of online stock-traders suggests much more. The Internet is shifting society’s balance of power in unanticipated ways. And the same tools that empower the little guy – allowing people to organise quickly and seemingly out of nowhere, troll powerful institutions and unleash chaos – can also give rise to extremist mobs waging harassment campaigns or the Jan 6 riot at the Capitol.