NEW YORK: Facebook took down a popular Wall Street discussion group, Robinhood Stock Traders, in a move its founder said was an unjustified response to conversations that have buoyed shares in GameStop and other companies.
GameStop, AMC Entertainment Holdings and BlackBerry have been at the centre of a market battle as individual investors coordinating on social media, including Reddit, and using trading apps such as Robinhood, bought shares and squeezed hedge funds that had bet big the companies would fall.
Allen Tran, a 23-year-old from Chicago who created Robinhood Stock Traders, said he woke up on Wednesday to a notification that Facebook had disabled the 157,000-member group. The notification said without detail that the group violated policies on “adult sexual exploitation”.
“We were first on the picking tree to be cut off because we are on Facebook, not a free platform like Reddit,” said Tran, referring to the typically lighter moderation on the discussion website.
Some of his group’s members made tens of thousands of dollars in trades first popularised on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, he said.
Facebook spokeswoman Kristen Morea said: “This group was removed for violating our Community Standards, unrelated to the ongoing stock frenzy.”
The Robinhood Stock Traders group was later restored, said Tran.
&uuid=(email))