Amid all the frenzy between independent investors rallying behind struggling companies like AMC, GameStop, and Blackberry and Wall Street investors, a popular Facebook trading discussion group had been shut down by the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company.
The ban happened amid the ongoing stock frenzy.
Facebook Bans Trading Group
According to Reuters, the Facebook Wall Street discussion group called Robinhood Stock Traders were apparently shut down for violating the platform's policy.
The 23-year-old Chicago native creator of the group, Allen Tran, said that he woke up on Wednesday, January 27, with a notification from Facebook, saying that they had disabled the group, which had over 157,000 members.
Based on the notification, which the news outlet had seen, the group's shut down was caused by violating the platform's policies on "adult sexual exploitation."
"We were first on the picking tree to be cut off because we are on Facebook, not a free platform like Reddit," Tran said.
The young man also guaranteed he did not see any inappropriate adult content on the Facebook group.
Read More: Robinhood: Who Owns the App and How it Changed the World of Trading [Origin Explored]
'Unrelated to Ongoing Stock Frenzy'
Meanwhile, Facebook spokeswoman Kristen Morea responded on the ban, saying that the Tran's Facebook group was removed "for violating our Community Standards" and assured that it had nothing to do with the ongoing stock frenzy.
Morea was asked to elaborate but refrained from doing so.
It appears that the group has already been suspended earlier this month, on January 7, after Facebook labeled it as a "dangerous organization."
However, the group was able to bounce back after Tran appealed to contacts on the platform.
"With all these major institutions being frustrated with the success of retail, they are trying to target any groups they can," the Robinhood Stock Traders Facebook group creator said, who was once featured in a Wall Street Journal article back in November 2020, describing the group as "the biggest of its kind."
The Chicago-native has apparently created a replacement group for the one that has been banned, but he fears that it would also be taken down.
r/WallStreetBets Discord Ban
Recently, struggling companies like GameStop and AMC had seen their stocks dramatically rise after a group of independent investors rallied behind them, cooperating via a Reddit thread known as r/WallStreetBets
Some members of Tran's group was able to make tens of thousands of dollars in the recent trades, thanks to the Reddit thread.
However, Discord has recently banned the server for the subreddit on their platform, this time for violating their policies regarding hate speech and violence.
According to a recent report by Tech Times, the subreddit thread was then turned private by its moderators, which lasted for an hour.
When they came back, the moderators responded to the Discord ban, saying they were disappointed at how things turned as they have been using a bot to block any of the hate speech, which was indeed common in the thread, especially as it had more than 3 million members.
The stocks frenzy has gained massive attention from the world and the media that even the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the White House are monitoring the situation.
Related Article: GameStop Stock Reddit 2021: WallStreetBets Group Behind Surge Now Targeting AMC Theaters
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Written by: Nhx Tingson
