Steve Huffman CEO, Reddit, comments on ‘Redesigning Reddit’ during the third day of the Web Summit at Altice Arena on November 8, 2017 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Horacio Villalobos | Corbis | Getty Images
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman will tell members of Congress on Thursday that no significant activity in the online community of WallStreetBets last month was conducted by foreign bots or agents, according to a copy of his prepared comments.
The hearing before the House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee comes after the WallStreetBets community unleashed a commercial phenomenon that caused GameStop’s stock to soar 400% in a week, reaching $ 483 per share. As trading volume soared, the online trading platform Robinhood was forced to temporarily suspend trading of GameStop and other important actions to fulfill its deposit obligations with clearing houses, preventing some traders from making earnings and generating at least one lawsuit .
GameStop closed at $ 45.94 on Wednesday.
“Since then, we have analyzed activity on WallStreetBets to determine whether bots, foreign agents or other malicious actors have played a significant role. They have not,” testifies Huffman, according to a statement of his planned comments. “In all the metrics we checked, activity on WallStreetBets was well within normal parameters and its moderation tools worked as expected.”
Huffman will testify alongside Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin, Melvin Capital Management CEO Gabriel Plotkin and Keith Gill, who serves for DeepF —— Value on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on YouTube.
“WallStreetBets may seem unusual or chaotic on the outside, but the fact that we are here today means that they have managed to raise important questions about fairness and opportunity in our financial system,” said Huffman. “I am proud that they used Reddit to do this.”