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...
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.
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.
People just randomly get excited and make up shit online. See Median Strategies aka Rahil Prakash just making up polls and publishing them this month. Then declaring it was a social experiment and shutting down his website. After affecting prediction markets in some minor ways.
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.
If anything - I actually think we're at a spot where the mask is slipping a bit, because the US was slow to adapt its media distortion to the internet, and the financial interests in the US are stretching even farther away from general sentiment.
So the notice is because they've fumbled, and now are beating the drum extra hard to try to make up ground.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The 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.
Agreed the synergies mentioned above are there but you 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.
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.
Humans 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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
> 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.
A lot of Xbox gamers were excited for Microsoft's acquisition of Activision-Blizzard back then, presumably because they figured they'd get console exclusives and day one access on Game Pass.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
Does anyone remember the FTC "comments" about net neutrality? And how completely made up it all was?
It must be that everything is like this nowadays.
[delayed]
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.
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.
I've long thought _everything_ is already like this.
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.
People just randomly get excited and make up shit online. See Median Strategies aka Rahil Prakash just making up polls and publishing them this month. Then declaring it was a social experiment and shutting down his website. After affecting prediction markets in some minor ways.
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.
Hardly need to add "Modern" on this statement. Hell - Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" is nearly 40 years old at this point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent)
If anything - I actually think we're at a spot where the mask is slipping a bit, because the US was slow to adapt its media distortion to the internet, and the financial interests in the US are stretching even farther away from general sentiment.
So the notice is because they've fumbled, and now are beating the drum extra hard to try to make up ground.
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.
With the shoehorning of certain topics into absolutely every conversation on every platform... agree.
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.
https://theonion.com/the-onions-exclusive-interview-with-lar...
> 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.
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.
The 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.
Agreed the synergies mentioned above are there but you 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.
Original article (linked in the submitted article): https://theintercept.com/2026/08/21/paramount-merger-warner-...
Stop Operation Mockingbird
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.
This should be illegal. Propaganda shouldn't be so pedestrian.
The need to focus on making movies not money.
> Paramount’s also been caught using an “astroturf” — or fake grass roots organization
... except the article presents no evidence the organisation is fake.
Why, what the hell is the point? Why would the average person care about a merger?
Humans 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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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?
> 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.
A lot of Xbox gamers were excited for Microsoft's acquisition of Activision-Blizzard back then, presumably because they figured they'd get console exclusives and day one access on Game Pass.
I imagine those people are quiet about it now.
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.
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.
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
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.
I don't think the poster was crying for those leaders
Correct. The industry employs many many middle and lower income people in LA.
And why would they care what the average person thinks about a merger?
They (Ellison) don’t. They want to pressure state law enforcement to give them a pass.
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.