We Did Start the Fire: r/wallstreetbets, ‘Flash movements’ and the Gamestop Short-Squeeze

Abstract

In January 2021, Wall Street suddenly faced a challenge from an online community, r/wallstreetbets, which organized a large group of small investors in betting against Wall Street hedge funds. In an instant, the online community came to resemble a social movement nature that brought them comparisons to Occupy Wall Street. To improve understanding of this phenomenon, we studied the Wallstreetbets movement relying on a mixed-methods research design, which combines an unsupervised topic model with in-depth qualitative coding. Our findings outline how Wallstreetbets became a ‘flash movement’, a movement that we define as arising swiftly without former planning or design, through the imbrication of social activities and affordances and constraints of online communities. Our study contributes to (1) the recent interest in spontaneous action in social movements; (2) how social media affordances and constraints affect social movements, and (3) extends methodologies for studying digital social movements.