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

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hhn_acker about 2 hours ago 27 commentsRead Article on techdirt.com

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Discussion (27 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

piloto_ciego•about 1 hour ago

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...

thatjoeoverthr•17 minutes ago

This goes back far, and I’ve even seen what appear to be shills for random B-list celebrities. Add SEO business as usual, political campaigns, international influence and the SnR is just radio static.

lefstathiou•32 minutes ago

Absolutely, billions (or trillions) of dollars of value and the future of the parties and our trade relations are at stake.

For Paramount, I'd imagine they have no choice but to do this. It would be naive to think its opponents aren't astro-turfing the other side.

kilroy123•about 1 hour ago

I've long thought _everything_ is already like this.

hotsauceror•30 minutes ago

This seems very much in the wheelhouse of clandestine agencies like the CIA and the FSB. Use front companies to modify the perceptions of reality by doing things like shifting the Overton window of currently discussed topics, preparing custom datasets for future LLM training that bake in desired assumptions, manipulating or publishing public opinion polls and prediction markets.

sleepybrett•9 minutes ago

You can see this in real time in our modern 'mainstream media', even MSNOW, the supposedly 'left-leaning' 'anti-foxnews' sounds more like a regan era republican than it's actual desired audience. If you turn on cnn it's just constantly drumbeating iran war/support for israel, etc.

forshaper•30 minutes ago

The 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.

RobRivera•15 minutes ago

I was literally just ranting about this yesterday regarding a reddit thread where the astroturfing was so obviojs and it is frustrating to see, because a large chunk of the population is in fact influenced by it.

prollings•13 minutes ago

With the shoehorning of certain topics into absolutely every conversation on every platform... agree.

muro•32 minutes ago

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

iooi•about 1 hour ago

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

airstrike•about 1 hour 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•19 minutes ago

This 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.

josefritzishere•26 minutes ago

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

chrisjj•30 minutes ago

> Paramount’s also been caught using an “astroturf” — or fake grass roots organization

... except the article presents no evidence the organisation is fake.

alightsoul•about 1 hour ago

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

thayne•44 minutes ago

I 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.

JumpCrisscross•34 minutes 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•7 minutes ago

less 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?

Mountain_Skies•37 minutes ago

Some 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.

slowin•39 minutes ago

The 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.

lokar•about 1 hour ago

They 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•about 1 hour ago

I 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

mistrial9•40 minutes ago

Hollywood 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.

pwdisswordfishq•about 1 hour ago

And why would they care what the average person thinks about a merger?

lokar•about 1 hour ago

They (Ellison) don’t. They want to pressure state law enforcement to give them a pass.

empath75•about 1 hour ago

In 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.