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Businesses Social Networks The Almighty Buck

Did 'Tens of Thousands' of Bot Accounts Hype GameStop's Stock and Dogecoin? (reuters.com) 45

Posted by EditorDavid from the to-the-moon dept.
Reuters reports: Bots on major social media platforms have been hyping up GameStop Corp and other "meme" stocks, according to an analysis by Massachusetts-based cyber security company PiiQ Media, suggesting organized economic or foreign actors may have played a role in the Reddit-driven trading frenzy... it is unclear how influential they were in the overall saga...

PiiQ said it identified very similar daily "start and stop patterns" in the GameStop-related posts, with activity starting at the beginning of the trading day, followed by a large spike at the end of the trading day. Such patterns are indicative of bots, said Aaron Barr, co-founder and chief technology officer of PiiQ. "We saw clear patterns of artificial behavior across the other four social media platforms. When you think of organic content, it's variable in the day, variable day-to-day. It doesn't have the exact same pattern every day for a month," he said... The company did not analyze Reddit data, but Barr said he would expect to see a similar pattern of activity on Reddit, indicating bot-like or coordinated management of conversations...

Based on its authenticity scoring system, PiiQ estimates there are tens of thousands of bot accounts hyping GameStop, the meme stocks, and Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency swept up in the frenzy. Thousands of fake accounts can be purchased for as little as $200, it said.
Reuters also reports that Friday America's Securities and Exchange Commission "suspended trading in 15 companies due to unusual trading activity and apparent attempts on social media to artificially inflate their stock prices. That is in addition to six stocks it recently suspended due to suspicious social media activity."
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Did 'Tens of Thousands' of Bot Accounts Hype GameStop's Stock and Dogecoin? More

Did 'Tens of Thousands' of Bot Accounts Hype GameStop's Stock and Dogecoin?

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  • The elites didn't win... it's fucking Russian bots... AGAIN!
    Why do Russian bots keep rigging the system against elites and keep allowing the little guy to get one over the rich and powerful? It's not fair! Only the rich and powerful like hedge funds and Hillary Clinton are allowed to have power and wealth! RUSSIA MUST BE STOPPED
    • what do you mean the elites didn't win? they most certainly did win. some lowly hedge funds lost.

    • You realize that three hedge funds own more shares of Gamestop than all the retail investors combined, right? Percentage held be institutions is 105% and they've been reducing their positions lately (it was 122% two months ago).

      https://www.nasdaq.com/market-... [nasdaq.com]

      Some of the big institutional holders are probably grinding retail investors out of their money using bots and high frequency trading to drive the price up so they don't lose money on their holdings, but all the retail sheep still believe in the anti-

      • Kind of suspicious that the company promoting a bot conspiracy is also acting like Russia is still a member of the G8 group and trying to harvest email addresses from the public's interest in the Gamestop hype train.

        Where does the original article or your NASDAQ link claim that the bots were Russian?

        • Nowhere. I just found it weird that the company promoting the suggestion of bots on social media was also promoting Russia as a member of the G8 on their website, when Russia has not been invited back in seven years now.

          https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]

          Same page has the Olympics and USA's ODNI logos, seemingly randomly without explanation.

      • They're hype the stock one week, drive the price up, sell a bunch of shares then buy it back.

        Retail investors can and have done the same.

      • You realize that three hedge funds own more shares of Gamestop than all the retail investors combined, right? Percentage held be institutions is 105% and they've been reducing their positions lately (it was 122% two months ago).

        https://www.nasdaq.com/market-... [nasdaq.com]

        Does this mean it is still heavily shorted?

        • Look on Yahoo finance, and find that the daily trading volume is so big, it's easily possible that they covered their shorts ages ago. Somehow on Reddit, comments saying that get voted down, but I haven't seen a credible rebuttal.

          • Look on Yahoo finance, and find that the daily trading volume is so big, it's easily possible that they covered their shorts ages ago. Somehow on Reddit, comments saying that get voted down, but I haven't seen a credible rebuttal.

            Based on the price of GME and this article, I think it is still being sold short: https://www.investopedia.com/a... [investopedia.com].

            • Sorry, that's not convincing at all, just the same non-arguments as on Reddit WSB. The share price of GME may well be subject to all kinds of Reddit action and shenanigans of big investment players (won't call them companies). GME is at 110 USD, market cap at 7.8B$, about 80M shares, and trading volume today is already at almost 20M shares, only 2.5 hours into the day. Why wouldn't those naked shorts not have been covered in the mean time?

              • Sorry, that's not convincing at all, just the same non-arguments as on Reddit WSB. The share price of GME may well be subject to all kinds of Reddit action and shenanigans of big investment players (won't call them companies). GME is at 110 USD, market cap at 7.8B$, about 80M shares, and trading volume today is already at almost 20M shares, only 2.5 hours into the day. Why wouldn't those naked shorts not have been covered in the mean time?

                Naked shorting is illegal. But as to selling short, you can readily sell short and if enough short sales are done the ownership can exceed 100%. If I owned all the shares in GME and lent you half, and you then sold them short, now officially 150% of the shares are owned. You don't have to "cover" your short sale until you are due to return the stock you borrowed. You might do it early to limit your losses if you think you have bet wrong. Lots of people would bet that GME will go down from wherever it i

                • Okay, I see what you're saying, it may still be sorted a bit, a lot, or somewhere in between. I just don't believe there's any evidence that it's a lot, and the quantity of trades makes it entirely possible for the situation having transitioned from a lot to a little. And also, if there were any naked shorts in quantity, for those to have been covered.

    • The elites didn't win... it's fucking Russian bots... AGAIN! Why do Russian bots keep rigging the system against elites and keep allowing the little guy to get one over the rich and powerful? It's not fair!

      I know you are joking, but the reason that teh internetz can screw with teh internetz is that

      It is

      So

      Fucking

      Easy!

  • Assuming there is a 1:1 relationship between user IDs and users (and IP adresses) has always been silly.

    We've all got computers. Automation is their whole point. It's not a bad thing, unless you make false assumptioms.

    Expect automation. Always.

    • Yup
      And

      ``PiiQ said it identified very similar daily "start and stop patterns" in the GameStop-related posts, with activity starting at the beginning of the trading day, followed by a large spike at the end of the trading day. Such patterns are indicative of bots''
      Or it's indicative of, you know, people who trade being active during trading times

  • Real people still had to pay real money (Score:4, Insightful)

    by iamhassi ( 659463 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @04:46PM (#61109300) Journal
    Hype doesn’t explain the price actually going up. Everything online is hyped, doesn’t mean every crypto or stock goes up like those did.
    • Oh no, the Russians inflated the stock artificially by... buying the stock...?
      Wait no, what, that doesn't fit the narrative at all! There must be a "hacker" or "fake buys" angle we can spin it!

      • Oh no, the Russians inflated the stock artificially by... buying the stock...? Wait no, what, that doesn't fit the narrative at all! There must be a "hacker" or "fake buys" angle we can spin it!

        Where's the evidence that anyone has been claiming "Rooshya didit?

        The only mention of Russians I've seen is people ridiculing people that claim Russia did it, a weird claim since I don't see where anyone but the apologists claiming something that didn't happen.

        • It's just the red scare all over again, blame the russians for everything when things don't go your way.

          • It's just the red scare all over again, blame the russians for everything when things don't go your way.

            So where is the red scare in this? Could be North Korea, could be China, could be Finland, could be Norway, could be Americans. could be any country in the world.

            It's just disingenuous to claim that someone is claiming that people are claiming that Russians did it, when no such claim has been made.

    • Re:Real people still had to pay real money (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @06:08PM (#61109504)

      Err WTF are you talking about. Cryptocurrencies and stocks have absolutely moved on hype alone. You can almost perfectly correlate the initial rise in Gamestop with direct action on r/wallstreetbets, and the subsequent huge spike on the day that it was picked up by the mainstream media.

      And no, not "everything online is hyped". That would be frigging silly. There's 100s of thousands of stocks out there that you've never heard of, yet I'm sure you know about GME, AMC, and BB, three stocks completely unrelated to each other with the exception that they were on the same hype train, all rose on the same day as they were picked up and hyped by news organisations.

      Now I know correlation doesn't imply causation, but this one is pretty damn obvious.

      • GME, AMC and BB were absolutely not unrelated. They were all related by having more that 100% short interest and out of whack failure-to-deliver numbers. Once observed with GME it took a handful of milliseconds before a search was done to identify candidates in the same situation.

        • They were all related by having more that 100% short interest and out of whack failure-to-deliver numbers.

          Having a 100% short interest means two things: Jack and Shit. The move of the stocks occurred because people were buying and selling. The short interest was precisely the feature which was hyped. Had it not been hyped it would happily have continued to sit there, god knows they've had that short interest for *well over a year*.

          • You missed the bit about the failure to deliver numbers. High FTD with high short interest means the MMs have only one option to meet their obligation to deliver by the next day - spike the price to shake out some shares. High short interest on it's own usually doesn't make any difference other than when it creates an illiquid situation.

  • Aaron Barr from HB Gary? (Score:3)

    by technoid_ ( 136914 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @05:05PM (#61109336) Homepage Journal

    Is this the same Aaron Barr from HB Gary that got hacked by Anonymous?

    Seems like he is still chasing the spotlight.

    He might be right on, but his reputation makes what he says worth zero.

    • >He might be right on, but his reputation makes what he says worth zero.

      The dude is always kinda sorta right but he never says anything amazing. His big claim to fame before was his "revolutionary" use of social media as a source of OSINT.

      This time he's making the profound declaration that maybe, just maybe there were people spamming and hyping meme stocks on Reddit. A site that has a small industry of services centered around spamming shilling built up around it. He's just some non technical

  • Is another man's high-frequency trader.

    • High frequency traders actually do high frequency trading and don't go spamming on twitter and reddit.

      You know I saw the stupid comment and had to call it out, why am I not surprised to see your name associated with it again.

      • High frequency traders actually do high frequency trading and don't go spamming on twitter and reddit.

        You know I saw the stupid comment and had to call it out, why am I not surprised to see your name associated with it again.

        However they could not name their discipline correctly. It's low latency trading. The frequency is not particularly high.

  • Shilling a position in the market is not new (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ritz_Just_Ritz ( 883997 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @05:27PM (#61109388)

    Boiler rooms have been replaced by an increasingly sophisticated group of outsiders using automated tools that previously had only been affordable by well-heeled investment banks and hedge funds.

    What you're seeing is the incumbents pushing back on the unwashed masses using strategies that had previously been their domain and it's now confusing their efforts to use automation and sophisticated models to front-run the market. Only "they" are allowed to do that.

    They are quickly circling the wagons to get the interlopers off their lawn. Look for significant lobbying dollars to induce fines and criminal punishment for unapproved participants. Cheaper for the big players to do that than it is to code their way out of this.

    Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson. Eat the red lembas...it'll be to your liking.

  • AMC, Probably (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Sunday February 28, 2021 @06:03PM (#61109494) Homepage Journal

    Gamestop had a good story. It's not hard to see the WallStreetBets angle.

    AMC, a Chinese-owned movie theatre chain, was $600M in debt and "somehow" the Gamestop parade got diverted to AMC. Magically it's out of debt. Brilliant use of bots.

    Doge seems to have been a hedge-fund ploy to distract Redditors from Gamestop.

  • If $something happens, it must have been external influence.

  • this is an attempted invocation of betteridge's law[1] on slashdot's part.

    >Bots hyped up GameStop on major social media platforms, analysis finds

    the source article is much more up front about the situation.

    P.S. this is my second comment on slashdot after lurking for years, and it's about the exact same thing as my first comment, less than a week apart. knock it off, slashdot

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • The upswing in both GMA and Dogecoin was not from a thousand accounts pumping it, but from a small number of known individuals promoting it. In the case of Dogecoin, solely Musk.

  • Normally the answer is "no". In this case, it's a qualified "yes".

    Lots of bots did talk up the price. It just didn't make much difference. The reason Doge spiked was because Elon Musk talked it up. He'll do it again in a few weeks. Gamestop just required enough posts to produce a certain level of hysteria. That happened way before the bots got there.

  • It will be how this time period will be described in the future. We've been in it for 8 years now, we're only just noticing. Naively we thought it was only facebook and twitter.

    The bots were noticeable because of the political chaos caused by social media, but they're everywhere. Accounts in local newspapers (so rife in my local area, the Wolverhampton Express and Star comment section is like a german newspaper from 1935). Places like NextDoor, Reddit. If it had registered accounts with no phone validation,

  • Of course they did.

    There's a whole industry around selling Reddit accounts, building and selling bots, etc. For $200 a relatively unsophisticated user could purchase 10 aged accounts and hire a code monkey to write a custom spambot with what's left over.

    With Reddit's huge userbase where every third user seems to be a software engineer, of course it happened. It's almost easier to talk about the unlikelihood that it didn't happen.

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