Not true. $25.00 (total fees) to short over $1,000 worth, via an extremely popular international brokerage. Furthermore, FINRA collects short information twice a month and releases it.
If shorts do not cover before these designated information-collecting dates, the positions (quantity of shares short) will be revealed, and the BS narrative that “retail doesn’t short, etc...) will empirically be debunked.
In order to maintain the illusion/false narrative BS that there aren’t retail shorts, they would have to cover.
When this fact is realized, bulls can capitalize on this situation. This is known as a win/win : )