GameStop was heading towards bankruptcy, with hedge funds taking short positions in companies like GameStop, in which they borrow shares of the stock at a certain price under the expectation that its market value will be worth less when it’s time to actually pay for those borrowed shares. In other words, they are betting on the stock price dropping, however something unexpected happened, the Gamestop stocks surged being driven by retail investors — individuals who buy and sell stocks for their own gains, as opposed to professional investors working on Wall Street — on the subreddit r/WallStreetBets (WSB), a community 2.9 million-strong decided to buy up as much shares of stocks as a joke. That ended up reviving GameStop, incurring massive losses on the hedge funds, and shaking the stock market. This short squeeze – as it’s referred to – is not uncommon but it doesn’t tend to play out in this public or dramatic a manner leading this case to be the talk of every news outlet at the time.
This case perfectly encapsulated the volatility and unpredictability of the stock market, as well as how it can be influenced heavily by the everyday person. Such cases also emerged with Eli Lilly and their Twitter fiasco more recently.
As such we recommend the deployment of a brand followup division for social media from companies, as well as more rigorous bylaws implemented within social media platforms in order to control, contain, and possibly prevent such situations.
Team:
Omar El Khatib
Omar Zbibo
Abdallah Moucarri
Karim El Hajj
Bassel Abou Zahr
Contributors: Abdel Rahman Al Estwani, Sara Al Nesany, Lea El Halabi, Nour El Saadi, Hadi Sleiman, Charles Wakim
Netflix is today’s world’s leading streaming entertainment service. With very humble beginnings, Netflix grew enough to successfully overcome Blockbuster. It then grew enough to fall in the loop of corporate greed and use social causes for its own growth.
Yes, read what you just read again… If you do not see what we are trying to say, here’s a quick video that summarizes our claims:
So our aim is to debunk the myths that shape a positive image of Netflix. It is not what it pretends to be. That said, we would rather take you down a quick story to walk you through our findings… and How we found them… To do that, please enjoy our Streamlit dashboard:
While we are sure Netflick$ won your hearts at first, we are also sure that you were left revolted by Netflow$’s greed. That said, we do not undermine the strategic mind of Netflick$ who quickly turned into Netflow$… In fact, Netflix’s strategic use of time and social causes to grow their public interactivity enabled them to create noise around them. For instance, when anger spurred because of the representation of a gay character in a Turkish Netflix show, people convened to watch the show on Netflix. Indeed, any publicity is good publicity.
While we have focused on LGBTQAI and BLM causes, we do also acknowledge that Netflix has most probably used the same strategy with other minority groups, and will probably still continue to capitalize on social causes- be it the ones we mentioned or others. It is Netflix’s way of being trendy and riding the wave, and it sure helps them grow (as you saw on the documentation). We strongly denouncethese uses. Nonetheless… if we were to pass one message to Netflix it would be the following: you might indeed capitalize over minorities and social causes, but at least, at the very least, improve the quality of the titles you add to your ‘social cause’-related categories… improve your representations of these minorities that suffer… you can capitalize, but at least make it worthwhile and properly help the minorities…
We leave you with your conscious to decide how to proceed with everything you just learned…
