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Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger
- alightsoul 8d agoWhy, what the hell is the point? Why would the average person care about a merger?
- pwdisswordfishq 8d agoAnd why would they care what the average person thinks about a merger?
- lokar 8d agoThey (Ellison) don’t. They want to pressure state law enforcement to give them a pass.
- lokar 8d agoThey are threatening to move out of state if the laws are fairly enforced. This concerns workers in the film industry, and people in LA generally.
- alightsoul 8d agoI forgot i don't live in the us. So in Latin America people just call it a day and survive and try to get another job, they don't even know companies lay off or move operations during mergers
- jubilanti 8d agoSo then why did it take me five minutes to find this article from a month ago about two different Mexican airline unions taking opposing views on the upcoming Volaris - Viva Aerobus merger over exactly these kinds of concerns? https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/empresas/2026/08/05/pelea-de-sindicatos-por-fusion-de-viva-y-volaris-stia-respalda-propuesta/ https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/empresas/2026/08/05/pelea-de... There's a dozen more across countries and industries if you want them. Stop being discriminatory against your own people as a way to protest HN's US-centricness. Latin America has massive labor unions that routinely have to decide what they are going to do when big corporations are about to merge in ways that will potentially harm labor power. Even more so than in the US, in fact.
- alightsoul 8d agoThis is all news to me. Like these news outside mexico are quite rare
- johnnyanmac 8d ago>So in Latin America people just call it a day and survive and try to get another job Not too dissimilar to the US. But "survive" is harder with the higher cost of Living. And hiring for a new role can take weeks at best. In this particular job market, it's not uncommon for professionals to go 6+ months before landing another role. Gig are a rising thing in the US, but those are also becoming competitive. And if you can't get enough gigs, you cannot even pay rent. Because of all of that, the few unions that are left fight harder than ever to try and maintain the jobs as is.
- alightsoul 8d agoIn Latin America people have fewer unions, usually centered around construction because it is very easy to die on a construction site. Latin American countries are among those least friendly to unions and there have been anti union crackdowns and proposed legislation to ban them or limit their functions. For example teacher unions. Parents are not defending teachers they are just being treated like disposable objects that are thrown away the moment they defend themselves, and they can do it because the unemployment rate is 10% and only 40% hold an employment contract.
- mistrial9 8d agoHollywood is its own worst enemy. The number of giant scandals and last-minute game changes are innumerable. As is widely documented, the extensive and stable assets of Hollywood studios are not being used on the best of days. Cry no tears for these leaders.
- johnnyanmac 8d agoGood, get out. If you're going to throw away an entire century of culture over not getting enlough tax breaks, you're a parasite. Not a taste maker. Don't get me wrong, it will be a big shock short term to artists, as seen the last few years. But in the middle-long term the invisible had fills in the gap. That's the whole point of competition, and why such monopolies harm everyone long term.
- empath75 8d agoIn general, they do not care about particular mergers. US laws regarding unfair competition happened because of abuse by big trusts 100+ years ago, Standard Oil in particular, and the result was a regulatory/legal approval framework. It really shouldn't _matter_ what the public thinks about particular mergers in terms of whether they are approved, but mostly lawsuits to block mergers are brought by states, and in this case, the astroturf campaign was targeted at the California AG, who is an elected official and answers to the public.
- thayne 8d agoI can think of several reasons why an average person might be opposed to a merger (ex. less competition and the things that go along with that like higher prices and lower quality, and fear that products and services will be discontinued after the merge). But I'm struggling to come up with a good reason why you would support a merger.
- Mountain_Skies 8d agoSome seem to believe that their favorite IP would get new productions in the merged company but I wonder if those posts were part of the astroturf campaign.
- JumpCrisscross 8d ago> I'm struggling to come up with a good reason why you would support a merger If I were a loyal Spirit Airlines customer, I’d have supported their proposed merger. Similarly, when an artist I love gets greenlit by a major studio, it’s news worth celebrating—they’re getting more resources at their disposal. (To be clear, I think the Paramount merger is a travesty, but mostly due to corruption rather than anything intrinsic to Hollywood needing protecting.)
- sleepybrett 8d agoless places for that artist to shop their film means less of a chance their film gets made. How is that good for you or them?
- JumpCrisscross 8d ago> less places for that artist to shop their film means less of a chance their film gets made When a small studio gets bought by a bigger one, it typically results in more production from the small studio. That’s good if you like their content. They Donny have to waste time shopping films, they’ve already been allocated a budget.
- mrguyorama 8d ago
- slowin 8d agoThe Ellisons already control way too many media outlets and have started instituting censorship on TikTok. They are aggressively Zionist and I think it's bad for our nation (and the world) to have a pro-Israel media empire feeding propaganda to people. Look at what CBS has become, Bari Weiss is fully control of the agenda and stories coming out of it.
- jubilanti 8d agoHumans have been concerned with monopolization and fair competition since at least Ancient Rome. Entire civilizations routinely revolt when the means of production and distribution are centralized to such an extent that both consumers and small businesses feel the pain. Something rubs people the wrong way when Crassus became the richest man in the Roman world after buying up all the fire fighting companies, then using that to extort homeowners to sell at a deep discount when they were on fire. That was followed by many reforms that led to a public firefighters. It was just over 100 years ago when the US went through its Trust Busting era breaking up the oil, steel, and rail. Ordinary people cared a lot about that. Enough to change the course of presidential elections. Edit: Also, have you ever complained about how all the TV shows and movies these days seem to be the same? Just endless franchises and remakes and product placement and lowest common denominator slop? Well, a good part of that is due to media consolidation, which makes it harder for smaller independent TV and movie studios to compete. The soon-to-be four companies in America that control 80% of mass media are basically hedge funds.
- regularization 8d agoBecause 5 companies control 80% of movie box office in the US and that number is about to shrink to 4? Not only making the profits and doing massive layoffs, but deciding what content we can see? When purchasing Paramount, David Ellison published a press release to the Jerusalem Press talking about how he supported the IDF financially. Actor Mark Ruffalo recently reminded people he said this, and Zionist organizations are denouncing him as an "anti-semite" for reminding people of this.
- piloto_ciego 8d agoMan... 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...
- kilroy123 8d agoI've long thought _everything_ is already like this.
- forshaper 8d agoThe older I get and the more old stuff I sieve through, the more I feel I grew up in an environment shaped by short-term persuasions, all added up like different archaeological layers. Every single ideal, value, word, and so on, just marketing that hit my parents, or propaganda that hit my grandparents. Which is why the Confucian rectification of names is appealing.
- ScoobleDoodle 8d agoWhat is "Confucian rectification of names"? Thank you.
- forshaper 8d agoLike freezing requirements. Definitions of words change over time to suit a winning faction. This was especially dramatic in the last century or so. So for the Analects, it's something like making sure words mean what they meant when the land was run well. "If names are not right then speech does not accord with things; if speech is not in accord with things, then affairs cannot be successful; when affairs are not successful, li and music do not flourish; when li and music do not flourish, then sanctions and punishments miss their mark; when sanctions and punishments miss their mark, the people have no place to set their hands and feet. Therefore, when a junzi gives things names, they may be properly spoken of, and what is said may be properly enacted. With regard to speech, the junzi permits no carelessness.”
- iooi 8d agoOriginal article (linked in the submitted article): https://theintercept.com/2026/08/21/paramount-merger-warner-discovery-david-ellison-antitrust/ https://theintercept.com/2026/08/21/paramount-merger-warner-...
- airstrike 8d ago> 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.
- mikeryan 8d agoThis is wrong Which part exactly? Seems you just described why the layoffs happen? Two things can be true here, the new company can find cost savings by eliminating redundancies and have to cut deeper than desired to be able to service debt.
- sroussey 8d agoThe cost savings from consolidating things like HR, and the debt payments are different by orders of magnitude. The cost synergies will be a rounding error. Structural changes like stopping investment in the future, mass layoffs, and selling off assets (or rights to the assets) will be required.
- mikeryan 8d agoAgreed. The synergies mentioned above are there but it’s not like one HR team can suddenly handle having twice number of employees and open reqs. HR and accounting tend to scale somewhat linearly to the size of the business. Not to mention that both those orgs have massive tasks to take on as a result of the merger so at least for the next year or two those efficiencies will be hard to realize. In the case of media orgs like this those efficiencies are even less pronounced because it’s not like you can consolidate product lines.
- airstrike 8d agoThe part where debt service is the reason for layoffs. Cost synergies exist even in deals financed with zero debt.
- muro 8d agohttps://theonion.com/the-onions-exclusive-interview-with-larry-ellison/ https://theonion.com/the-onions-exclusive-interview-with-lar...
- chrisjj 8d ago> Paramount’s also been caught using an “astroturf” — or fake grass roots organization ... except the article presents no evidence the organisation is fake.
- klaff 8d agoUm, the organization is real. The "grass roots" part of it is clearly fake.
- josefritzishere 8d agoThis should be illegal. Propaganda shouldn't be so pedestrian.
- cheschire 8d agoTeaching 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.
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- badgersnake 8d agoThe need to focus on making movies not money.
- webdoodle 8d agoStop Operation Mockingbird
- MarioMan 8d agoSeveral 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.
- tmpz22 8d agoA popular MMORPG went through a period of not enforcing rampant botting, gold farming, and similar activities which provided a substantial boost to their user numbers. A short time after the acquisition, they announced major initiatives to combat botting, bringing the user count back down. IANAL, but couldn't this be fraud?
- nemomarx 8d agoIt would depend on how they presented user numbers in the merger discussions I think basically. If they promised anything about how organic the users were or suggested they were well paying for revenue projection purposes?
- mitxela 8d agoRuneScape presumably?
- wooger 7d agoSame as twitter.
- gruez 8d agoPresumably whoever is doing the acquisition would look at the financial numbers in addition to the subscriber numbers? Then they'll notice a discrepancy between subscriber count and how much $ is coming in, which makes this whole thing unravel. It's far more likely it's just run of the mill incompetence and/or change of leadership prompting an "efficiency" drive.
- rglover 8d agoOh, to be a corporate puppet [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmuEIRY9VUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmuEIRY9VUg
- iamnothere 8d agoConcepts 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 8d agoIt 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?
- throwitaway222 8d agoI guess the next area of active development will be turf spotting plugins for your browser to actively flag users that are engagement farming in off season and black pilling on season.
- slg 8d ago>They will have post histories hidden Reddit has strangely trained me to be skeptical of this form a privacy protection in a way that I'm not on any other platforms. If someone on Reddit has one of those default two words and a number usernames and then hides their history, I'll block them for the slightest reason. If someone has an intentionally chosen username and doesn't hide their history, it's much easier to tell they aren't a bot or troll account which automatically gives them a significant benefit of the doubt in my mind.
- skinfaxi 8d agoI personally appreciate very much that this site doesn't have such a feature.
- 8d ago
- steveBK123 8d agoI 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.
- loganfrederick 8d agoThe counterargument to this is that a lot of the actual film production no longer happens in California anyway. A lot of cast and crew have grown accustomed to flying to locations where productions are being made for tax reasons. The film & TV industry doesn't seem to be as anchored in LA as tech is in the Silicon Valley area.
- juliusceasar 8d agoPosting it here is also antisemitic...
- mitxela 8d agoEvery company is doing this for everything.