The popular perception of the enemy on Reddit, Wallstreet and communities on Twitter is ‘Bruce’. ‘Bruce’ has slicked-back hair, wears designer suits, drives a red sports car and is currently on his third marriage to a 20-something Instagram model. Back in January, ‘Bruce’, an avatar for thousands of venture capitalists and Wall Street speculators, made the bet that the value of GME (the company that the video game retailer GameStop) stock was going to fall. Venture capitalists betted against GameStop not just because it was hit hard by the pandemic but mainly because it’s a company that sells video games and people now buy those online.

Hedge funds borrowed shares of stock from brokers in hopes that they could sell them and buy them back at a lower price when the predicted drop happened. However, the predicted drop did not happen, at least not when the Wall Street sharks expected it to. Individual investors, organising primarily on r/wallstreetbets, bought into GME stock en masse, driving the price up artificially – a tactic that is called the “short-squeeze”.

Many ‘little guys’ in the stock market are facing unemployment and under-employment, waiting for the two United States (US) parties to quit playing politics in the House and Senate with their stimulus cheques. The little guys are teamed up to eventually cost these ‘Bruces’ a total of $19 billion as of January 29. Of course, “the establishment”, lobbyists for large corporations and big tech companies, had to intervene at this point. Robinhood and other trading apps blocked further buying of shares in GME, AMC and others that were being short-squeezed.

The subreddit, where these individual investors were communicating strategy via meme, was shut down (temporarily) for “hate-speech”. This, in part, led to stock prices falling precipitously after being grossly overvalued as frantic retail investors encouraged one another to hold the line. Is it any surprise that a system designed to enrich the one percent and maintain income inequality in America is retaliating in such a lock-step manner against this upset? There was, after all, a legitimate reason behind why Trump was able to marshal populist anger against the corruption of “the swamp” to an Electoral College win in 2016.

The clients of these free trading apps are Wall Street speculation firms that pay them to track trading trends amongst retail investors – much like how Facebook and other social media companies sell user data to advertisers.

Robinhood and similar brokerage apps allow retail investors to buy and sell stocks from the comfort of their own homes. Owing perhaps to the lockdown, individual investors were responsible for 19.5 percent of trading volume in the first half of 2020, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. It may not be clear to their users that they are not the true clients of apps like Robinhood. The clients of these free trading apps are Wall Street speculation firms that pay them to track trading trends amongst retail investors – much like how Facebook and other social media companies sell user data to advertisers.

There are now stirrings in Washington that there should be tighter regulations governing stock market trading. Short-squeezing is quite a common tactic used by Wall Street firms against their competitors but never before has the government felt compelled to push for stricter regulation, but this time it’s the billionaires who are facing losses.

For small-dollar investors on platforms like Robinhood, the goal of this movement, at least on the communal level, seems to be to force the ‘Bruces’ of the world to sell out their shorts. You’ll hear a lot of mainstream American analysts try to convince the twitterverse that the stock market is not meant to be used like a casino. But the truth is that these reddit investors are just beating hedge funds and big investors at their own game.

The question for individual investors is going to be whether they are motivated enough to stick it to Wall Street to risk losing their own investments in GameStop and other companies (such as AMC, a theatre company that too was overvalued in January), as they saw a meteoric plunge in the beginning of February. The artificial inflation of these stock prices is bound to plummet at some point and the last people to jump ship (be they career or novice investors) will face a significant loss.

Many people have invested their life savings or retirement funds into this Wall Street take-down. And holding the line, heroic as it may seem given the number of memes this call to action has inspired, is still risky. But as stocks begin to rise again, slowly but steadily, as of Wednesday, it might still prove to be the winning strategy. The key for small investors is going to be to get out just before the bubble bursts. Whether retail investors profit on the individual level or not, the GameStop saga truly demonstrates the power of social media as the power of collective action and the value of democratising information.

The writer is a staff member. She can be found on Instagram @amar.alam_literally