LAUSR

In January 2021, the users of subreddit r/wallstreetbets (WSB) triggered an unprecedented short squeeze by driving up GameStop’s stock price to an unimaginable high point. During the event, a large number of users participated in the discussion about GameStop and coordinated trading behavior on r/WSB to push the stock price higher. In this article, we investigate the characteristics of the collective behaviors and social dynamics from the evolutions of topological structure, discussed topics, and user sentiment polarity (SP) by constructing dynamic interaction networks, modeling the topic, and analyzing the user sentiment. We find that the topological structure of the interaction network evolves toward a more efficient direction, the discussed topics change more centralized, and the user sentiment tends to be more positive and divergent. And we reveal that part of GameStop’s stock price is explained by the social media activity, popularity of the dominant topic, topic cohesiveness, SP of users, and sentiment divergence between interacted users on r/WSB. Our work quantitatively characterizes the interaction networks and user behavior during the GameStop short squeeze and provides an example to analyze the event which synchronously evolves in the physical space and cyberspace. It not only contributes to the analysis of social system behavior and structure but also provides valuable insights into the financial practice and policy decision-making.