Anti-censorship

i've been thinking of something... about the potential playbook of the infiltration of the superstonk mod team.

in the past, the superstonk mods gave the community several "warnings". in these warnings, we were chastised for our behavior, for apparently being a bunch of misfits that would brigade / raid other subreddits with aggressive comments and other such inappropriate behavior. as a consequence for the supposed terrible behavior that we were accused of, as mentioned above, restrictions were put on the subreddit so that we weren't allowed to tag users or link to posts in other subreddits.

we were told that this was necessary because if we didn't improve on our behavior that reddit would eventually shut down the subreddit. this was basically used as a threat to hang over us: behave as we say, or this whole place is gone.

this is the thing i've been thinking about.

i'm operating on the assumption here that there has been a persistent coordinated COINTELPRO type of effort that has been waged against superstonk for a long time. i think it would probably be foolish to not assume this. i think it would be foolish to assume that our opponents have not had keen awareness of the existence of superstonk and the types of conversations that were happening there. and if they have awareness of the existence and discussions happening on superstonk, which they definitely do, then it would be foolish to assume that they have not been actively been deploying COINTELPRO techniques to try and destroy that community one way or another.

and so, on superstonk we were subject to these warnings, these threats that if we don't all calm down and do what we're told then we would all be kicked out. and the more i think about it, the more i think that it might have always been a sort of coordinated bluff, partly by the mods and partly by reddit itself. we know that Fidelity has a significant financial interest and influence into Reddit, and we also know that at least 1 mod of superstonk was apparently a former employee of Fidelity by their own confession.

Just think about what would happen if superstonk did actually get banned one day.

that is a large subreddit with many members. the banning of superstonk would cause a large reaction among the community, a streisand effect type of reaction. there would be lot of froth and attention on reddit, and on GameStop / GME, and alot of questions without good answers. "why was it banned?" the provided justification would be because of "brigading" and persistent "harassment" of other communities and members, but we would all know that these would be bullshit justifications.

i think that, from the perspective of the opponents of GME investors, who have the desire and motivation to try and destroy the largest online community of GME investors, superstonk, they probably have thought about this warfare at great lengths.

i used to fearfully believe that superstonk would eventually get banned from reddit. but looking back on those warnings we received, it looks to me like the strategy all along was not to get the subreddit banned, because that would cause too much of a reaction and bring too much attention to the delicate situation that is GME. so rather than aiming to get the subreddit banned, they instead deployed methods to simply destroy and rot the subreddit from within without getting rid of it. By imposing very restrictive new rules on us that greatly hampered our ability to share information to and from other communities, by scolding us for our behavior, by deliberately confusing and censoring topics of conversation such as DRS plan vs DRS book, and abusing their position of authority to ban any members that cause any fuss and don't get with the program.

If their objective was to destroy that subreddit without getting rid of it, to create basically a shell of what it once was, I think that they have achieved a lot of success in this endeavor.

Which is why, I've changed my view, especially now that we have a growing interest and awareness of the fediverse and this Lemmy instance.

I actually hope that superstonk does get banned by reddit. I want the reaction that will follow that, the streisand effect. I want to see the increased attention on this whole situation by curious onlookers. Some onlookers will be able to see that it is just plainly absurd that investors of GameStop that just wanted a place to talk about their company are getting censored for no good reason. I think they fear this reaction, and this is why I generally believe that they probably never intended on banning the subreddit in the first place, but simply used that as a bluff in order to subjugate us all and our enthusiasm for GME. at this point, in my view the nuking of superstonk would only be a good thing.