Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger

alightsoul

Why, what the hell is the point? Why would the average person care about a merger?

piloto_ciego

Man... I am wondering how much of everything this is these days... This is just one instance, but the propaganda effect I think is happening strong. I think probably all of public opinion is being manipulated like this...

iooi

Original article (linked in the submitted article): https://theintercept.com/2026/08/21/paramount-merger-warner-...

airstrike

> In reality, mergers like this — particularly when involving Warner Brothers — have a long history of resulting in mass layoffs, higher prices, and lower-quality product as the merged company tries to pay down debt from the deal. This is wrong. There are mass layoffs because you don't need 2 HR departments, 2 Accounting departments, and so on. You can often do away with lots of sales & marketing too, in some industries. These are called "cost synergies" in M&A, and are basically the only synergies someone will give you credit for in a deal. Debt financing is not required for there to be cost synergies.

muro

https://theonion.com/the-onions-exclusive-interview-with-lar...

chrisjj

> Paramount’s also been caught using an “astroturf” — or fake grass roots organization ... except the article presents no evidence the organisation is fake.

josefritzishere

This should be illegal. Propaganda shouldn't be so pedestrian.

cheschire

Teaching someone to recognize astroturfing is about as evil as teaching them to recognize bad kerning (insert relevant xkcd). You’ll destroy their blissful ignorance forever.

badgersnake

The need to focus on making movies not money.

webdoodle

Stop Operation Mockingbird

MarioMan

Several years ago, Paramount was handing out free monthly trial codes for Paramount Plus every month. Then, some time in 2020, they just ”forgot” to cut off my access after the trial ended. I had free Paramount Plus from then until 2025, when they merged with Skydance. The free subscription expired almost immediately after the merger was announced. It’s evident to me now that they did this to boost their active subscriber numbers. I’m sure a lot of people didn’t even realize this had happened to their accounts. And those that had weren’t about to complain about it too loudly.

rglover

Oh, to be a corporate puppet [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmuEIRY9VUg

iamnothere

Concepts like astroturfing, “flooding the zone”, and other PR shenanigans ought to be taught in schools, ideally with students doing it themselves (under supervision) to see how easy it is. Lots of people assume that this stuff is rare when it’s more or less the status quo for all major PR campaigns. Not understanding this gives ammunition to those who want to dismiss such accusations as a “conspiracy theory”.

asdff

It is funny seeing how turfed reddit gets in the eve of something like an election. What I do is use RES to flag people who post nothing but political articles. They will have post histories hidden but if you dig a little you see they basically all post the same sort of fodder in like 15-20 subreddits at once. If they post comments it is often formulaic madlibs and repeated all over. But the biggest tell is all the users I flaired and were previously dominating posts on the subreddit go cold immediately after the election. The whole page goes from flared users posting political articles back to unflared users posting whatever they tend to post. This happened most recently with accounts I found posting pro Tom Steyer content ahead of the CA governor primary. I will still see a few of them active on occasion but still with the same posting patterns: all politically bent articles put in the right subreddits for engagement with them. I'm guessing it is just a general bot ring for rent used by various media companies and pacs little different than leasing a billboard. I wonder what the companies look like that actually lease these rings out?

steveBK123

I always find these sort of "we'll pick up our ball and change homes" threats by non-monopoly capital interesting. It's almost a real thread from say GM, ignoring the billions of physical plant infrastructure that would be relocated. But in industries where there is enough competition and a large talent pool, being the regional defector makes you the odd duck out in the war for talent. Similar to the quiet walk back of a lot of the Tech/Finance "we are moving to Miami" bros, I don't think you're going to get a lot of entertainers doing projects down in Texas. I guess this is why Big Capital wants to replace us all with AI so they can re-dom to Puerto Rico with servers in Elons orbital datacenter.

juliusceasar

Posting it here is also antisemitic...

mitxela

Every company is doing this for everything.