Part 4 of 6 - Censorship of Plan vs Book
Part 3 of 6 - Fidelity versus DRS GME
Part 4 of 6 - Censorship of Plan vs Book
Part 5 of 6 - Elimination of DRSyourGME
Part 6 of 6 - Necessity of the Fediverse
Censorship of the topic of DRS Plan versus DRS Book
On November 19, 2022, Wall Street Journal posts: "GameStop’s Ryan Cohen Wants to Be More Than a Meme-Stock King"
That same day, Ryan Cohen identifies himself on Twitter as the Book King, and tweets:
"I also want to be the Book King 👑"
It is hard to know for sure what RC really means when he tweets things that are ambiguous.
Some contextual facts relevant to these circumstances:
-Up to this point there is now a movement present on the internet, primarily on Reddit, that is sharing and communicating information about DRSing shares of GME, for the purpose of protecting their investment and exposing fraud that has been perpetrated against GameStop, particularly that GameStop is a victim of excessive naked short selling, behavior which is illegal but continues to happen because the perpetrators exploit vulnerabilities in the system and evade detection.
-GameStop Corp is clearly aware of this situation and makes mention of DRS numbers in their quarterly reports.
-the implications of this situation that shares of GME have been excessively over-sold means that events could transpire that might cause a large short squeeze. Some might even call this theoretical event the "Mother of All Short Squeezes" or MOASS for short.
-Ryan Cohen, as chairman of GameStop is clearly aware of this situation.
-From the SEC's Key Points About Regulation SHO: "Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal."
Therefore, in consideration of all of these contextual facts, it stands to reason that Ryan Cohen can not, and has not, and will not say or do anything that could in any way be viewed as scheming or manipulating the price or availability of a stock in order to cause a short squeeze, because this would be illegal according to the SEC.
DRSing shares does directly reduce the availability of shares in the market and therefore naturally has an effect on the price of the stock, among other consequences. Despite being completely aware of everything that is happening, and despite that DRSing shares is a completely legitimate action that investors can take, Ryan Cohen has not and most likely will not ever say to GME investors that they should be DRSing their shares, because this would be considered to be manipulative and ultimately illegal.
However, this situation does not preclude Ryan Cohen from saying things that are strategically ambiguous, things that give him plausible deniability. When Ryan Cohen tweets things that are ambiguous, the community of GameStop investors is looking for an interpretation that might plausibly be a clue that is intended for us. While we never know for certain what RC is trying to convey, his tweets often do have the effect of causing GME investors to start looking for information in new places.
With respect to the esoteric reality of DRS, there is a distinction between shares that are held in DRS Plan versus DRS Book. Not until RC tweeted that he wanted to be the Book King did we give this distinction any attention.
Shortly after November 19, 2022, members of Superstonk and elsewhere began discussing the distinction between DRS Plan versus DRS Book, with a consensus forming that shares should be held in DRS Book only, something referred to by Paul Conn of Computershare as "pure DRS," and that this might have been what RC was alluding to with respect to his tweet about being the Book King.
But, surprisingly, or not, there was resistance to discussions about the DRS Plan versus DRS Book distinction. Moderators of Superstonk started to clamp down on these discussions and created a boilerplate message that they started to include in every one of these discussions that represented their view and interpretation of the situation. Nobody ever asked the mods to do this but for reasons unknown, they evidently felt compelled to propagate their view into every discussion about this topic. The view that they propagated essentially concluded that Plan and Book are actually the same, there is no significant distinction worth discussing, and therefore it was actually okay to keep your shares in Plan and to not bother ensuring that they were in Book.
This went on for a while until the discussions around Plan versus Book eventually dissipated, with the mods of Superstonk essentially deciding unilaterally that regardless of what the consensus was, it was their view that this was a settled matter and that further discussion about this topic would no longer be permitted.
Over the subsequent months, Plan versus Book discussion appeared to have generally disappeared, and posts that brought it up were often removed.
One might think that this was rather unusual behavior from moderators of a community that was endlessly curious about ambiguous information that had significant implications for the success of their investment. Wouldn't we want to understand with certainty the situation and it's implications this way or that way? Why was there all of a sudden the compulsion of these moderators to confuse the consensus of the community and to replace it with their own view, and to prevent any further discussions about it?
No matter, the hive mind never rests. There existed the much smaller community on Reddit called r/DRSyourGME, created by the DRSGME.org team, numbering approximately 5 thousand members at the time as opposed to Superstonk's more than 850 thousand members.