Pump and dump schemes being regulated being framed as a free speech issue? I don't know if it is productive to make this about free speech. The purpose of life isn't just to emit speech, and indeed the purpose of WSB is for people to exhort other people to action and that action is to buy and sell certain stocks, so that a subset of participants can profit and other people lose their capital. "Speech" is not the central issue or the most interesting one to me about this case, it is rather more interesting to see how mobs can be formed and influenced to take action.
The law isn't set up to regulate 'distributed' peer to peer pump and dumps. The precedent is all focused on clearly identifiable orchestrators.
E.g: I run a stock newsletter. I hire a boxer, Evander Tyson, to hype a biotech penny stock, Scampill Co.. Tyson says to his followers and to my newsletter subscribers that Scampill is about to get a drug approved by the FDA that will cure cancer. I and my friends at Scampill make sure that the patsies have enough stock to buy when I put out my first email blast. When the stock goes up 900% we sell our shares. At that point there are no more large lots on the market, the spreads widen, and the price collapse occurs.
The SEC then sends their feds after me, the boxer I hired, and my friends, the insiders at Scampill. If they can catch me, I do some time in club Fed and have to pay some fines.
In this instance, there is no insider collusion, there is no single promoter with an interest, and there is no commonality to build a class among the redditors etc. who participated in the manipulation. You have a mixture of people who may have said illegal things and people who had totally licit (in the eyes of the law) motivations and actions. You have a big mixture there of mens rae and its absence and a big mixture of types of actus reus and the lack thereof. It is a big mess as compared to making a case against the typical P&D mob scheme.
Yet, you have an outcome that is somewhat similar to a classic P&D, and on a regulated marketplace, whereas most P&Ds happen on less regulated over the counter markets.
I just think it's really hypocritical of the government to advocate for freedom when they're literally making the market less free. The only markets to be regulated should be the ones that would otherwise be in market failure, like medicine.
