Turning Stocks into Memes: A Dataset for Understanding How Social Communities Can Drive Wall Street

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new annotated dataset from Reddit's r/WallStreetBets to analyze community-driven stock buying intent and social influence, providing insights into online social movements and collective financial behaviors.

Contribution

We developed a novel dataset capturing user intent and support for coordinated stock buying on Reddit, enabling analysis of social influence and communication in online communities.

Findings

Dataset reveals patterns of persuasive language and narratives.

Community support correlates with specific communication styles.

Insights into social influence on financial decision-making.

Abstract

Who actually expresses an intent to buy GameStop shares on Reddit? What convinces people to buy stocks? Are people convinced to support a coordinated plan to adversely impact Wall Street investors? Existing literature on understanding intent has mainly relied on surveys and self reporting; however there are limitations to these methodologies. Hence, in this paper, we develop an annotated dataset of communications centered on the GameStop phenomenon to analyze the subscriber intentions behaviors within the r/WallStreetBets community to buy (or not buy) stocks. Likewise, we curate a dataset to better understand how intent interacts with a user's general support towards the coordinated actions of the community for GameStop. Overall, our dataset can provide insight to social scientists on the persuasive power to buy into social movements online by adopting common language and narrative. WARNING: This paper contains offensive language that commonly appears on Reddit's r/WallStreetBets subreddit.