Even if this be true, in part, the short sellers are merely taking advantage of the fact that more than 50% of the value of stocks owned today is NOT OWNED by persons or institutions that make their own decisions about what stocks to buy or sell.
The majority is now run by mathematical algorithms that index funds use to keep an index fund in proportionate sink with the index it mimics - be it the Dow Industrials, the S&P 500 or any other. Those funds - index funds - are merely lemmings that follow whatever direction an index goes, up or down. Those lemmings now outnumber the value traders and speculators. So in today’s Wall Street Markets, it only takes a minority to push strongly enough in one direction - up or down a bit - and the majority holdings will follow more or less “automatically”. Repeated often enough they can become like a snowball that can’t stop itself.
A good benevolent dictator would realize the problem of having too many lemmings making a majority of stock investment decisions, as they just provide opportunities for market manipulators.
Welcome my son, welcome.to the Machine