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 inform members of Congress on Thursday that no more activity from the company’s WallStreetBets online community was driven by robots or foreign agents, according to a copy of his prepared comments.
The hearing before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee comes after the WallStreetBets community sparked a trading phenomenon that caused GameStop shares to skyrocket by 400% in one week, reaching $ 483. per action. As trading volume skyrocketed, online trading platform Robinhood was forced to temporarily suspend trading on GameStop and other hot shares in order to meet its deposit obligations to clearing houses, blocking some operators to make a profit and causing at least one lawsuit.
GameStop closed Wednesday at $ 45.94.
“We have since analyzed activity on WallStreetBets to determine whether robots, foreign agents or other bad actors played a major role. They have not done so,” Huffman will say, according to a statement from his planned comments. “In all the metrics we tested, activity on WallStreetBets was within normal parameters and its moderation tools were working as expected.”
Huffman will testify alongside Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin, Melvin Capital Management CEO Gabriel Plotkin, and Keith Gill, who goes through DeepF —— Value on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on YouTube.
“WallStreetBets may seem messy or chaotic from the outside, but the fact that we’re here today means they’ve managed to raise important issues about equity and opportunity in our financial system,” Huffman said. “I’m proud to have used Reddit to do that.”