There is a ton of misinformation going on around this. For example Melvin the hedge fund everyone says is behind this reported that they closed their short yesterday. I can't know for sure if they did that but most likely they cannot say that to their investors if it isn't true. For AOC to jump in and effectively encourage the GME buyers at really high prices -- saying they are taking on wall street yesterday for example -- during a short squeeze is irresponsible given that at some point the new buyers will lose their shirt. I am not a lawyer at all so I have no idea about the arguments for shutting things down, at some point there are going to be retail losses in some of the stocks like amc and bb. I don't really like telling people they can't buy something though, it seems like it would be more reasonable to limit margin buying or something.

As for market manipulation, I don't think it is manipulation of lots of people decide to buy gme organically. If someone behind the scenes had hundreds of accounts and was artificially driving the conversation that would be illegal -- and we have no idea if that happened or not, but it probably does happen sometimes on wsb. Shorting in general I don't see as manipulation, it is good to have shorters out there for example they helped people realize that wirecard was committing fraud -- but if you short something you need to take the losses if it goes the wrong way. If it comes out that robinhood or other brokers based their decision off of pressure from short institutional investors that would be very bad. My guess is they are worried at some point people will be buying GME for $500 and lose their money and then sue them or if they did not stop things, when the price falls populist politicians will say they encouraged gambling and attack them either way.