Reddit’s WallStreetBets (WSB) community has adopted around 3.5K gorillas in only six days! The gorillas were adopted from the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, a charity that protects endangered mountain gorillas. The charity also received more than $350K (£252K) in donations.
In a video, its president Dr. Tara Stoinski thanked the Reddit community for the adoptions and “incredible support.” The video was posted on the subreddit and upvoted over 159K times.
Dr. Stoinski told BBC News:
They’ve truly made a difference for our world and shown what can be accomplished when people come together. When we save gorillas, and we save forests, we save our world.
The gorilla adoption trend began on March 19, when a WSB community member posted that they had donated to the charity, which allowed them to adopt a gorilla. The post was upvoted more than 112,000 times, with other members following suit – leading to 3,500 gorillas being adopted in under a week.
The charity tweeted:
In a typical weekend, we might get 20 new adoptions. This weekend, the numbers astonished us. It’s safe to say that the investor community on Reddit is not traditionally who we think of as our supporter base. But they definitely surprised and overwhelmed us over the weekend.
At the start of 2021, there were around two million members of the community. That number increased to 10 million in March after its users invested in the computer game retailer GameStop and drove up the share price.
The goal was to get as many Reddit users to buy GameStop shares as possible, so they could boost the price, hurting hedge funds that had bet against the company. Now, the community has steered its attention to saving mountain gorillas.
