Big tech is organized against the little guy and at the end, they are no worse than the Wall Street, whether they wear shorts and t-shirts, turtlenecks or suits.
For example, the WSB Discord was basically such a trainwreck that the WSB mod team themselves admitted they had significant problems keeping it under control. We can extrapolate that to Facebook as well. Hell, the WSB mod team even locked /r/WSB for a few hours to try and figure out a moderation plan. Most online platforms either rely heavily on community moderation (Discord, Reddit) or a small army of employee moderators that have to be rotated out frequently for the sake of their own mental health. Neither of these models work well for an already-rowdy community suddenly 10xing themselves in both scale and frequency of rules violations. It's basically uncontrollable and the only option is to shut it all down until you have a chance to cool off. (Again, that's why /r/WSB was locked yesterday.)
As for Google, they took a third approach: heavy automation. They have shittons of antispam systems specifically targeted to prevent review spamming. A sudden burst of 100k negative reviews from legitimate users angry that they can no longer participate in a financial flash mob is technically indistinguishable from someone who bought and compromised 100k accounts and decided to threaten Robinhood with negative reviews. Your antispam system isn't going to understand context (e.g. Robinhood fixing the books in a particular direction) but it is going to understand timing.
There isn't really a good way to handle this. The null option of "do nothing and let the problem fester" isn't a good option. This is because people will figure out that WSB is the server/subreddit/group you go on in order to break the rules and get away with it. Anyone with a chip on their shoulder about platforms having any sort of moderation rules will deliberately spam these corners of it, and normal people will assume that such behavior is now OK because there's no enforcement. This will spill over into other corners of the platform until everything is as bad as the lowest common denominator. (See also: what happens to subreddits as they grow, the entirety of 4chan, etc)
More charitably, you can explain most of these actions (maybe excepting Robinhood's actions) by the mods of these platforms and locations being roughly as surprised by things as Melvin Capital.
For instance, I have no problem with letting Nazis present their views - it only makes them look as ridiculous as they actually are, and tyranny by Nazis is no better than tyranny by Socialists/Communists, so reasonable people who are not ignorant of history should strongly oppose both. (Although, arguably, the Nazis were far less effective at killing millions of people than the Communists were...)
I'm more inclined to believe Google is trying to head brigading off. When they start being more active however ... then we can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt.
But I'm 100% with you wrt Discord/FB.
Only we aren't, and we are still soaking up massive shitloads of inqueqlity and blood-boiling rule-bending like the good folks we are. For reasons that are, for all practical purposes, exactly like "god says I can", only this god is called "the free market". Slightly less superstitious, but no less unreal or stupid as the old thing. It's amazing how much you can get depressed thinking about the sheer "same shit different day"-ness of human civilization.
A privileged mob on reddit armed with Macbook pros does not equal the people sticking it to the man.
Reddit itself is part of the oligarchy everyone is railing against.
What I’m asking is why market manipulation is a bad thing, as long as it’s happening out in the open and everyone trading GME knows it’s a manipulated stock.