The rise and fall of WallStreetBets: social roles and opinion leaders across the GameStop saga

Nowadays human interactions largely take place on social networks, where online users’ behavior often falls into a few general typologies or “social roles”. Among these, opinion leaders are of crucial importance as they have the ability to spread an idea or opinion on a large scale across the network, with potential tangible consequences in the real world. In this work we extract and characterize the different social roles of users within the WallStreetBets community on Reddit, around the time of the GameStop short squeeze of January 2021 – when a handful of committed users led the whole community to engage in a large and risky financial operation. We discern the characteristics needed to play a particular social role and we identify the profiles of average users and relevant outliers, including candidate opinion leaders, using an iterative, semi-supervised classification algorithm. The key features of these users are making large risky investments and providing constant updates on a single stock, which attracted a large following and, in the case of GameStop, sparked the interest of the community. After the short squeeze event, we observed a substantial change in user behavior and attitude: no new opinion leaders emerged and the community became less focused on investments. Overall, this work sheds light on the users’ roles and dynamics that led to the GameStop short squeeze, while also suggesting why WallStreetBets no longer wielded such large influence on financial markets, in the aftermath of this event.