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.
Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger (techdirt.com)
366 pointsby hn_acker19 hours ago120 comments
MarioMan 17 hours ago
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.
tmpz22 16 hours ago
A 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 16 hours ago
It 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 7 hours ago
RuneScape presumably?
wooger an hour ago
Same as twitter.
gruez 16 hours ago
Presumably 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.
cjkaminski 15 hours ago
The issue is that "whoever" isn't a single homogeneous entity. I would presume that someone in the organization spotted the discrepancy. Having worked closely with (and sometimes for) large corporations, I cannot presume that C-Suite decision makers were sufficiently aware of the issue. Or perhaps they didn't weigh the issue properly. Or maybe they were consumed by a desire to complete the merger, no matter what. There are quite a few ways this could have gone, internally, and still arrived at this place.
thesuitonym 13 hours ago
Anecdotally, I've worked at places where the due diligence process wasn't so much about determining if a course of action is good, but justifying a decision that was already made. If the subscriber count and income don't mesh, just use whichever number makes the merger look better.
skywhopper 15 hours ago
You’d think, wouldn’t you? But there are so many promotions and discounts and bundles going on that it’s never a linear relationship. So no one would be able to easily tell the numbers were diverging for at least a few quarters. And as long as they are both headed up, no one actually cares anyway. But if you wanted to juice the growth rate or slow the churn rate just a bit to look better or hit some target that you were just shy of, it’d be easy enough to add a “bug” to forget to bill some certain percentage of trial accounts.
Or maybe they just suck at the coding that handles trial accounts. As rapidly as this stuff was rolled out, and as late as the decisions about actual promotions probably get made, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t buggy.
mixdup 14 hours ago
Yeah, there is no way to back out consumers vs. revenue at basically any big company. They all report "ARPU" or average revenue per user, because there is always a spectrum of pricing, almost never a single price. Between bundle pricing with partners, promo pricing offered for new customers, customers on old plans that haven't upgraded or updates, depending on the type of service and how they manage it there can be hundreds of price points in play for any given customer
That isn't to say there's no way to audit for this kind of situation, they could definitely report out what every single customer is paying and just find the ones that = zero
WarmWash 13 hours ago
JPMorgan bought Frank in 2021 for $175M, and the companies databases where all very obviously procedurally generated.
Zigurd 14 hours ago
Has anyone Loopt sama into this discussion?
magicalhippo 14 hours ago
> 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.
Reminds me of that scene from Office Space:
piloto_ciego 18 hours 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...
kilroy123 18 hours ago
I've long thought _everything_ is already like this.
forshaper 18 hours 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.
ScoobleDoodle 16 hours ago
What is "Confucian rectification of names"? Thank you.
forshaper 13 hours ago
Like 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.”
hotsauceror 18 hours 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 17 hours 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.
horsawlarway 17 hours ago
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.
ChrisMarshallNY 15 hours ago
A classic Yes, Prime Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks
wang_li 17 hours ago
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.
mmooss 16 hours ago
How does that theory explain,
* So many people using the same nonsense talking points at the same time. Did they coincidentally make up the same lies? With no anchor in objective reality, why would they converge on the same talking points?
* The sophistication of the talking points: IME they are often very well-crafted - seemingly professionally crafted - public communication. They effectively frame the debate, shift attention (often attacking the messenger), use powerful emotional impact to bypass reasoned discussion, and acheive the main goal of disinformation - paralyze discussion. Did people invest the time and effort to craft these talking points on their own, and do it so effectively?
wang_li 14 hours ago
It's not exclusively random people doing random stuff, but it also doesn't require a large, well funded, conspiracy. People see a fake poll that confirms their preferences and then proceed to propagate the message.
mmooss 13 hours ago
Also, consider who controls what propogates and what nobody sees.
Social media operators are like news (newspaper, tv news) editors, deciding what gets covered and how, and what doesn't. But they operate on a far larger scale, more powerful scale, and very few realize they do it.
vablings 17 hours ago
Haha, you think the CIA and FSB loves doing this stuff? Companies love doing this kind of stuff way more than your government employee shmucks. It is way more prevalent in private sector than you could ever imagine
pstuart 16 hours ago
It's both.
lefstathiou 18 hours 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.
autoexec 16 hours ago
The opponents don't have to astro-turf. They can express their genuine feelings about the merger and the well known problems of media consolidation. Paramount has to astro-turf because there isn't any actual support for what they want outside of the small number of people who will make a ton of money in the deal.
saalweachter 16 hours ago
The thing about saying "everyone does it" to justify yourself is that eventually you start believing it.
thatjoeoverthr 18 hours 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.
RobRivera 18 hours 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.
jmspamerton 16 hours ago
isn't reddit mostly astroturf? Try to get a conflicting opinion on anything political.
RobRivera 15 hours ago
The main traffic ones yes. News and politics definitely.
Niche ones aren't as mucb thankfully.
A large volume of content is downstream recycling of the tiktok feeds
sph 3 hours ago
People in niche subs participate in popular ones and thus are participant or influenced by astroturfing campaigns. It’s just much harder to tell at small scale, but it’s naive to continue perpetuating the meme that small Reddit subs are fine.
mitxela 7 hours ago
"your account has been suspended for promoting hate or violence"
prollings 17 hours ago
With the shoehorning of certain topics into absolutely every conversation on every platform... agree.
jvanderbot 17 hours ago
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.
Jtsummers 17 hours ago
https://ktul.com/news/local/data-center-scandal-who-sent-fak... - Naturally, data center projects are also getting in on this made up fun.
eclipticplane 16 hours ago
Now the propaganda is that the anti data center movement is a fake campaign by China.
Which, sure, maybe it's amplified by them but go visit any of these cities public council meetings. People are legit mad about them. Energy prices are already through the roof, they are massive facilities that don't provide much local employment after being built (even the construction crews are contracted in from elsewhere), they get massive tax breaks in exchange for 1 time local development fees, get exempted from noise ordinances, pollution laws, and crammed down communities in backroom deals.
Not hard for foreign adversaries to escalate what's already a terrible deal for the citizens of most cities.
cjkaminski 15 hours ago
You're very correct. It's much, much easier to amplify sentiment that already exists, as opposed to attempting to manufacture sentiment from nothing at all. That's been true for as long as propaganda has existed, afaik.
pavlov 13 hours ago
Brexit was the flagship of combining this approach with the cheap leverage available on social media at a time when people were more innocent/ignorant about it. Russia clearly influenced the UK vote, then applied those lessons elsewhere in the West.
(The Brits themselves seem to consider this subject somewhat taboo, even though Putin continued to mock them with operations like murdering people in broad daylight in Salisbury in 2018.)
piloto_ciego 15 hours ago
I'm honestly, pretty convinced that it's the opposite. I mean, people are spooled up? But I think the sentiment is entirely generated beyond the normal complaints?
Like, yeah, people are annoyed, so like you say, foreign adversary just dumps targeted gasoline on the issue until people are rabid. Meanwhile, I don't see dick about the Epstein files, the ice raids, or literally crazy levels of authoritarianism in the general zeitgeist... It's like that other stuff piqued the interests of people for 20 minutes in March, then they stopped caring as soon as some people got fired at DHS.
You guys remember "No Kings?" When is the next one of those? When is the next of any kind of protest? Where is the awareness?
Timon3 13 hours ago
I see all those topics brought up, both here (though usually flagged) and on the Fediverse.
Why wouldn't the tech companies, rich capitalists and current US government use these services to drum up support? I mean hell, why wouldn't they use the product they're building for this purpose? They have every incentive to.
0cf8612b2e1e 10 hours ago
To the public, data centers = AI. What material good has AI brought most people? Increased energy and RAM costs. Real and promised mass layoffs. More slop to read at work. Some good memes.
I am surprised opposition is not even stronger.
verdverm 16 hours ago
welcome to the post-truth world, where online manipulation are the "truths" like the world's greatest conman "posts," the (mal)intent seems intentional to me
mmooss 16 hours ago
One way to look at it: Why wouldn't they use this capability? (Moral qualms?)
Powerful interests, including corporations and foreign powers, have long worked effectively to frame public perceptions, even when their access to the members of the public was as limited as newspapers and a few broadcast TV stations, and filtered through editors. And they did it effectively.
Have they stopped for some reason?
And would they be less effective for some reason? The new tools - direct access to billions of individuals, wide bandwidth, no filters - should make them far more effective.
It's amazing to me that the fact of them doing it isn't well-known (there is plenty of research and evidence) and assumed, but still a question even on HN. Bring it up to most people and they will ostracize/ridicule you - an odd response which I can't explain well, given the evidence, likelihood, and very serious consequences which those same people are unhappy with.
Interestingly, over the last several years powerful interests have worked - successfully - to shut down research on this issue, including at places like Stanford and Harvard.
piloto_ciego 10 hours ago
Man, I would love to hear more about the Stanford and Harvard research chicanery.
mmooss 3 hours ago
Do you mean, how they were shut down? It is well documented, including in the NY Times.
mike_bob 15 hours ago
This has been ramping up like crazy the past 2 decades ever since the conservative ruling on Citizens United vs FEC where they decided it's a corporations right, as a person (with zero input or approval from it's actual employees), to donate unlimited funds to politicians. The main stream media has whitewashed this topic so much over the years, and now we're seeing government actually suppressing factual reporting, and/or threatening them with lawsuits so they conform.
It's insanity, but that's the new GOP for you, all the good people have left or been forced out. The only people pushing back on this are the Bernie Sanders and AOC types, which IMO is far less dangerous, and better for the common person, than a radicalized right wing.
asdff 14 hours ago
Goes all the way back, beyond the printing press, beyond writing. Mass communication is mass control. The shaman/priest/king/commissar/marketing exec literally shape and control the reality of their flock. They have absolute power to make them march even to their certain deaths against all their best interest. And they will do it singing and smiling as they are slaughtered for you and your gain, and will tell stories of heros who made your profit possible.
Truly terrifying technology, the real darker implications of what is possible from mass communication. What strange animals we are: make the right combination of sounds at us and we will turn and kill our kin.
Slow_Hand 14 hours ago
It's increasingly practiced in the open in the music industry these days.
There was a recent row over the revelation that Chaotic Good, a music marketing company, was astroturfing on behalf of the bands Geese and Sombr.
I had a meeting last week with a well-known record producer who tells me labels are increasingly leaning into astroturfing.
Just two days ago a colleague told me about his bandmate whose day job is managing five Instagram accounts to astroturf for Mk.Gee. According to her, "Mk.Gee is not allowed to know about it", with the implication that he would reject it if he did.
hydrogen7800 13 hours ago
Makes payola seem quaint. In fact, past crimes all seem quaint these days.
mitxela 7 hours ago
They used to serial kill one person at a time, now they do millions
specproc 12 hours ago
I worked in PR for a bit. I'm confident in saying most of our information ecosystem is the product of numerous competing (or cooperating) PR agencies pushing their clients' products, policies, narratives, and national agendas.
If it's in a big news outlet, there's a pretty good chance someone put it there. Most news stories start life as press releases. Astroturf groups provide the quote-fodder.
If you're into this stuff, I can't recommend All the Worst Humans by Phil Elwood enough, fantastic read (to be taken with a pinch of salt, the guy's a PR hack after all). NYT review here: https://archive.md/cNmdV
catlikesshrimp 11 hours ago
That's why it is good to have MORE investigative media outlets, not less. Wikileaks and the Panama papers are outliers which must be facilitated.
muro 18 hours ago
asdff 14 hours ago
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?
throwitaway222 14 hours ago
I 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 14 hours 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 10 hours ago
I personally appreciate very much that this site doesn't have such a feature.
mitxela 7 hours ago
Nobody makes intentional accounts any more because they get banned so easily (ex: if you imply Israel did a bad thing) and you need to remake accounts a lot.
airstrike 18 hours 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 18 hours 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.
sroussey 17 hours ago
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.
mikeryan 17 hours ago
Agreed. 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 15 hours ago
The part where debt service is the reason for layoffs. Cost synergies exist even in deals financed with zero debt.
crims0n 17 hours ago
The higher prices is also wrong, adjusted for inflation. And the lower-quality products is subjective at best.
I really hate when authors undermine their own (often valid) points.
airstrike 15 hours ago
Well said. Exactly.
johnnyanmac 14 hours ago
And the subjective sentiment is that people feel bad afterwards. It's hard to find American mergers where people are saying "I'm so glad these companies merged".
Hence the astro-turfing campaign.
mitxela 7 hours ago
"it's subjective so it isn't real"
bmandale 15 hours ago
There shouldn't be "mass layoffs" for that reason. If they are both reasonably large companies, the size of the HR department depends on the number of employees. When you merge the companies, the number of employees initially stays the same, hence there is no HR to be fired. You might consolidate the HR departments, and this might lead to some roles becoming redundant, but not on a mass scale. Similarly for accounting, marketing, etc.
The fact is that there are no synergies for many companies, even companies operating in the same industry. The reason for promoting a merger between such companies is exactly that they will see reduced competition and hence greater profitability. The ideal merger is actually between companies making different products, where the one company can benefit from more vertical integration.
airstrike 15 hours ago
I'm telling you from my experience having done 25 M&A transactions worth many billion dollars.
These cost synergies exist and are a major driver behind deals, though not the only driver.
iooi 18 hours ago
Original article (linked in the submitted article): https://theintercept.com/2026/08/21/paramount-merger-warner-...
juliusceasar 11 hours ago
Posting it here is also antisemitic...
rglover 17 hours ago
Oh, to be a corporate puppet [1].
mitxela 7 hours ago
Every company is doing this for everything.
josefritzishere 18 hours ago
This should be illegal. Propaganda shouldn't be so pedestrian.
iamnothere 14 hours ago
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”.
cheschire 17 hours ago
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 17 hours ago
The need to focus on making movies not money.
steveBK123 13 hours ago
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.
loganfrederick 13 hours ago
The 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.
webdoodle 17 hours ago
Stop Operation Mockingbird
chrisjj 18 hours 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 17 hours ago
Um, the organization is real. The "grass roots" part of it is clearly fake.
alightsoul 19 hours ago
Why, what the hell is the point? Why would the average person care about a merger?
pwdisswordfishq 19 hours ago
And why would they care what the average person thinks about a merger?
lokar 18 hours ago
They (Ellison) don’t. They want to pressure state law enforcement to give them a pass.
lokar 19 hours 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 18 hours 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
jubilanti 15 hours ago
So 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...
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 14 hours ago
This is all news to me. Like these news outside mexico are quite rare
johnnyanmac 13 hours 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 11 hours ago
In 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 18 hours 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.
freejazz 17 hours ago
I don't think the poster was crying for those leaders
lokar 17 hours ago
Correct. The industry employs many many middle and lower income people in LA.
johnnyanmac 14 hours ago
Good, 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 18 hours 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.
thayne 18 hours 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.
Mountain_Skies 18 hours 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.
JumpCrisscross 18 hours 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 17 hours 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?
JumpCrisscross 17 hours 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 16 hours ago
>When a small studio gets bought by a bigger one, it typically results in more production from the small studio
No, you get the small studio forced to produce more, when that is not how art is made. Eventually you milk it dry and it sucks for everyone except the people who walked away with more money from owning things.
Bungie being pushed to produce more didn't make more genre defining games. Same for id.
In fact, thanks to the stupidity of Xbox and Sony, we have very clear evidence very recently that allowing big studios to buy and run small artists is a great way to pump out low quality slop that doesn't even do well financially.
johnnyanmac 14 hours ago
Bungie is especially funny because it wasn't out putting more games. With the sunsetting of destiny 2, Sony traded one golden goose for a normal one. I guess that's inevitable when management changes.
Id is an odd example, though. They seemed to be the most reasonably managed Xbox studio in quality and output. Pretty much every other studio (outside of Obsidian) acquired this decade has barely gotten more than 2 games out post acquisition, but Id is (was?) a solid 3-4 year clip of releases with support for each title.
>allowing big studios to buy and run small artists is a great way to pump out low quality slop that doesn't even do well financially.
Scale definitely matters. When it's a very small team getting publishing deals, it's often exciting, because usually it's just a team that really needs money being thrown money and at worst some milestones and feedback. When it's a somewhat sustainable studio of 20+ devs it starts to get shaky when acquisitions come in and you wonder if corporate will ruin that synergy. By 100+ it really should be a proper studio that can support operations and not be too prone to being gobbled up into another wing of megacorp.
0x457 9 hours ago
> When a small studio gets bought by a bigger one, it typically results in more production from the small studio.
Sure, but quality of those movies go down. Best scenario, studio that made N good movies a year, now makes N good movies plus M bad movies, but more likely big studio will capitalize on small studio name to make bad movies.
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago
> but quality of those movies go down
Nothing requires this and there are plenty of counterfactuals to this claim.
An artist having to sell their work to distributors and producers every time, versus selling their brand once and then getting carte blanche for a while, both of these are methods with benefits and downside and neither has a monopoly on great work.
> big studio will capitalize on small studio name to make bad movies
Eventually, probably. In the meantime the artist could take time otherwise spent fundraising to do what they do best.
xp84 17 hours ago
Agree. I'm also remembering the previous grocery store merger in the western US, where the regulators meddled and, while they did approve the merger, they forced a large number of stores to be sold off, but they were sold to a tiny, inexperienced operation who proceeded to go bankrupt within a year, so rather than an area having two "Albertson's" or whatever, all those areas then had one Albertson's and one vacant store. Anybody with sense could have seen that coming and if they didn't want to lose their convenient grocery store altogether, they might have been arguing to simply allow the full merger.
Why not just block that merger? Well, the "non-greed" case for mergers is often that while it may result in a dominant position in a narrowly-defined market ('supermarkets'), they are sometimes needed to preserve the existence of that category as an alternative to another giant that has expanded into a new market, in that case mainly Walmart and to some extent, Amazon, both of which can afford to subsidize something like Ritz Crackers with the profits from selling tires, lawn furniture, or AWS.
You could also consider the Sprint/T-Mobile merger in those terms: Both were circling the drain and really only competing for the most price-sensitive customers, as everyone knew both had inferior service to the other 2 networks. Either or both could have ultimately been liquidated, to the absolute glee of Verizon and AT&T. While it hurts emotionally to think of there being fewer players in that important and specific market of real MNOs, it's true that the MVNOs do seem to be thriving today and, for people who can do even basic research, you can get way better deals (in terms of value and price) on cell phone service today than you could 10 years ago thanks to them, even with fewer 'real' carriers.
Note: None of this is directly relevant to Paramount, which I don't think existentially needs the merger - from either side.
brendoelfrendo 16 hours ago
> The "non-greed" case for mergers is often that while it may result in a dominant position in a narrowly-defined market ('supermarkets'), they are sometimes needed to preserve the existence of that category as an alternative to another giant that has expanded into a new market, in that case mainly Walmart and to some extent, Amazon, both of which can afford to subsidize something like Ritz Crackers with the profits from selling tires, lawn furniture, or AWS.
Ah, but then is the argument that we should allow a merger among smaller players because it prevents a narrowly-defined market from being entirely consumed by larger, broader businesses; or should we argue that the larger, broader businesses that can exert influence over large swaths of the market prevent the existence of a competitive marketplace?
xp84 14 hours ago
I'm going to be humble that I don't have a perfect "fix" that I'm confident would be a net positive. If anything, the most suspicious business practice being done anywhere in the US currently is the AWS cash cow subsidizing everything else Amazon does, to the ruin of dozens of other markets. I just don't know how I'd even word legislation that would rein that in, in a way that wouldn't be overly subjective (and thus subject to the whims of ultimately, the Supreme Court), not trivially bypassable by structuring ownership creatively, and also not having terrible overregulatory impacts. Like, should "Bob's Corner Store & Cigarettes" be able to sell milk for just $2 a gallon to try to bring people in to buy cigarettes, whose profits more than pay for that loss? Probably? And he should also be able to use the profits from his successful cigarette operation to run a money-losing arcade next door, if he wants.
But at what point does it become distorting the market? I deeply hate regulations which punish behavior "only for sufficiently succesful" players, and I've seen how the existing "special competition rules for monopolists" lead to endless debates of "but I'm not a monopoly!" and it seems really clear that all of the trillion-dollar-market-cap companies are too powerful (they own too many politicians) to ever let themselves be classified as such, no matter what.
irishcoffee 11 hours ago
Wouldn’t a “simple” fix for the AWS thing just be to force amazon to split aws out into its own company? Google (alphabet) and Facebook (meta) should probably get split up too.
johnnyanmac 14 hours ago
I wouldn't say an artist greenlight is a "merger". Anymore than a startup getting seed funding is a "merger". The scales are completely different, as is the nature of the contract.
But yes, the only real reaosn to support a merger is I have stock in one of the companies ". For obvious reasons; M&A acquisitions almost always spike the share price.
Hamuko 17 hours ago
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.
slowin 18 hours 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.
jubilanti 17 hours ago
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.
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 16 hours ago
Because 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.