Creek, you may have a point. I did the research. Here is a conclusion from a research project:

However, in the absence of material news, message board activities are likely to influence market activities, especially for the small‐cap stocks examined in this paper. Accordingly, we propose the following hypothesis. For stocks with no material news, online posting activities (the number of messages, sentiment, and disagreement) affect short‐term trading activities (returns, volatility, volume and the bid‐ask spread).

Here is the study link:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j...%20spread).