Image via prankster who sought to trick internet users into thinking the financial press was c
The increasingly bored-seeming WallStreetBets crowd has decided that instead of pumping real companies, it’s going to start focusing its energy on a fake one. In what is apparently a practical joke meant to trick media companies like this one into covering a fake story—and I suppose we are, so the joke is on us—people have plastered Reddit and Twitter with proclamations that a fake company called #LMNOP would soon be going to the moon.
Advertisement
The point of this joke, if you want to call it that, seems to have been to see how easily people and bots can be duped. Some of the involved people appeared to suggest that they had successfully triggered some Twitter bots into pumping #LMNOP without irony. “Twitter and Reddit bots have been tricked to pump $LMNOP, a company that does not exist,” the trading “education” platform Market Rebellion tweeted. We couldn’t find evidence of that—and that might be part of the joke—but enough people did pile into the “gage” to get it trending on Twitter, and isn’t that the point of everything?
Personally, reading the tweets, I couldn’t help but feel that the joke could have been turned around. The work involved in pumping a fake company isn’t too different from promoting GameStop, it ends up. Maybe that’s the point.