The GameStop Event is actually a great example of Section 230 at work. If Reddit were headquartered in England, it would have almost certainly been hit with an injunction and been forced to cut off the WSB subreddit. This is why Reddit isn't based in England. https://twitter.com/jkosseff/status/1354457644992507906

I was chatting with @IvyAstrix and a few others about what the GameStop event likely means in the context of social media and the law last night on Clubhouse. The Gamestop mob is the latest incarnation of memes crossing into the real world with real world consequences.

The prototypical versions of this were the Habbo Hotel griefers back in 2007-08. We will also recall that those griefers - or at least their fellow travelers - experimented with real world organizing in a series of protests, around the world, against the Church of Scientology.

These protests made national news around the world for various reasons. Here's the BBC's coverage of one such protest.

There are a number of other events of political importance which I'll avoid naming on Twitter in the last four years which have also, clearly, been meme-driven, and which would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. The election of Trump is likely one of them.

It's fun being in crypto because on the one hand I can see institutional people totally rattled and on the other I have the memers being euphoric that they are using their power to screw a hedge fund. Roles have been reversed.

However, I can also see that once the lulz have been had, the Gamestop event will likely lead to calls for (a) Section 230 reform by elites who are rattled that a bunch of shitposters can ruin them in the markets and (b) some type of regulatory intervention in the markets.

In other words, the people who stand to lose the most from Gamestop-style events are going to try to curtail freedom of speech and economic freedom by targeting the technology companies that enable the exercise of those freedoms.

4Chan, Anonymous, Trump's election, the riot at the Capitol, and the Gamestop short squeeze (the Squeezening?) are all examples of how the Internet is hacking an analog society.

New analog methods are required. Unless we develop a new trivium to teach people to shrug off rageposting, unless we start writing contracts to treat the Internet as something as disruptive as a war, we will be at the mercy of events like this.

Additionally, and this is a descriptive statement rather than a normative one, American regulators need to pick up the pace to adapt. The FBI is already very fast moving; the SEC and CFTC, by contrast, are not.

There are a range of possible responses here, good and bad. The bad ones will involve trying to destroy social media as a platform for communication. The good ones will involve regulators getting to grips with the reality which is not, is never, going away.

Regulators have clearly made phone calls today https://twitter.com/kr00ney/status/1354476264342474759

Exactly this. Political violence was apparently excusable to media elites until it breached the Capitol; short squeezes were apparently excusable to financial elites until they got rekt by Reddit https://twitter.com/ae22ann/status/1354474706850598914

Continuing my Gamestop-legal megathread, my guess is that Discord doesn't want to get absolutely annihilated with subpoenas so they decided to nuke the server. https://twitter.com/NeerajKA/status/1354580490678915075?s=20