Reddit CEO Steve Huffman remarks on “Redesigning Reddit” during the third day of the Altice Arena Web Summit 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 on the company’s WallStreetBets online community has been led by robots or foreign agents, according to a copy of his prepared remarks.
The hearing before the Financial Services Committee of the US House of Representatives comes after the WallStreetBets community triggered a trading phenomenon that increased GameStop shares by 400% in one week, reaching up to $ 483 per share. As trading volume increased, the online trading platform Robinhood was forced to temporarily suspend trading in GameStop and other hot actions to meet its depository obligations at clearing houses, blocking some traders from making gains and triggering at least a process.
GameStop closed at $ 45.94 on Wednesday.
“Since then, we’ve looked at WallStreetBets to determine if robots, foreign agents, or other bad actors played a significant role. They didn’t,” Huffman will testify, according to a statement in his planned remarks. “In each value we checked, the activity in 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 runs DeepF —— Value on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on YouTube.
“WallStreetBets may seem second-rate or chaotic from the outside, but the fact that we’re here today means they’ve managed to raise important issues of fairness and opportunity in our financial system,” Huffman said. “I’m proud to have used Reddit to do this.”