Naked short selling is no longer allowed. Someone need to own...

Naked short selling is no longer allowed. Someone need to own shares, then lend it to someone else to sell. Effectively the shares the 1st party owned has been sold leaving an off-market obligation by the 2nd party, seller, to buy the shares back at a future point and deliver back to the lender.
Long term this has little to no effect on the share price. There is not an unlimited number of shares that can be sold short. If say there is a steady short interest in a company of 10%, then the short interest no longer has any effect on the share. Unless the shares keep dropping, the short interest will be covered at some point as it no longer makes money. There is a borrowing cost in shorting the shares.
The shares then get bought back and this may or may not result in a share price increase.
The short interest in PLS looks to be around 4% at the moment. It is too small to have any meaningful effect on the share price over time. People have watched and read too many conspiracy stories to understand this. If everything in our lives was being manipulated, then we are living in the Matrix and there is no hope for the future.
The constant talk about "Manipulation" makes this sound like an episode of The Penguins of Madagascar(some light amusement that watching with kids can take the mind of the evils of shorting stocks in this world). There is always some mysterious evil party at work.
PLS is my biggest holding. The share price is down for a number of reasons, least of which is "Manipulation"/shorting. The first reason is that there is not enough people willing to bid the price up. This seems to be generally influenced by the negative connection to the falling lithium carbonate prices in China. This is not the market into which PLS is selling, but hydroxide also trending lower everywhere. This creates a negative environment.
On the other hand PLS is still minting cash. So if you want to see it the Penguins way, there is a fight between good and evil underway. This being PLS generating loads of cash and lower trending lithium prices. If lithium prices stabilise, then PLS will win, but while there is a downward trend I don't see the share price shooting the lights out any time soon, but please just stop the complaints about "Manipulation"!