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HBO boss apologises for using fake Twitter accounts to troll TV critics

The HBO CEO and chairman, Casey Bloys, has apologised for tasking employees with creating fake Twitter accounts to attack TV critics.

Bloys was responding to a bombshell Rolling Stone report that referenced alleged text messages between himself and Kathleen McCaffrey, HBO’s senior vice-president of drama programming. In six conversations, the pair discussed a “secret army” that could respond to TV critics who gave HBO shows a negative review.

sugarfree ,
@sugarfree@lemmy.world avatar

No need to apologize, king

YoBuckStopsHere ,
@YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.world avatar

Normal behavior on xitter

_dev_null ,
@_dev_null@lemmy.zxcvn.xyz avatar

He apologized for:

He admitted that six tweets over an 18-month period was “not very effective” but apologised to anyone who had been involved.

Six tweets that we know of and got caught for. How many more weren’t found in discovery?

StereoTrespasser ,

That is exceptionally thin skin. And it’s amazing to me that the CEO of HBO has so much time on his hands.

…nah, I take that back. Pretty much confirms what I assume CEOs are doing all day.

snownyte ,
@snownyte@kbin.social avatar

Lots of money and time. Makes me wonder - why do CEOs exist again?

soloner ,

CEO bad

A7thStone ,

You are correct sir.

Potatos_are_not_friends ,

I mean, this is how reputation companies work, the relationship shady ones.

Im seeing less of it. But I felt like when Marvel was at it’s heyday, when Eternals came out to bad reviews, I saw what had to be astroturfing. Like just a lot of vague “best marvel film ever, this critic doesn’t understand” comments everywhere flooding the internet.

kboy101222 ,

Yeah there’s no way that every PR company for these companies aren’t flooding social media with astroturfing. It’s easy and effective.

Though for marvel they might not have to. There are some marvel fans that nearly make kpop fans seem sane with their stanning. They just can’t accept that they made a bad movie cause it’s their entire personality

mindlight ,

Everything counts in large amounts as Depth Mode once sang. Especially in the corporate world, everything is measured in “financial risk” and PR management costs. If Google can make $10 million in doing some shady shit they will sure as hell do it if the fines will be less than $100 thousand.

So, I have an idea… Whena large corporation is caught with their pants down… Let’s say a global fashion brand that got caught using child labor and the CEO cashed $20 million in bonuses…

Then the question for the CEO should not be “Are you sorry?” but “How sorry are you? Are you $500 thousand sorry? $1 million sorry? $10 million sorry? $50 million sorry?”

That’s how you create an interest in the leadership of corporations of actually taking responsibility of their actions.

HBO apologizing means nothing. They can and will probably similar shit in the future because no one actually loses anything they hold dear.

JohnDClay ,

Law should have fines based on the amount the organization profited from the action, not just damages. Maybe go by whichever (damages or benefit) is higher?

JustZ ,
@JustZ@lemmy.world avatar

I have personally seen the internal memos of multiple large companies from the 1970’s in which the executive wrote some version of “while the dangers of asbestos are clear, changing to another material would not help meet the financial goals of our asbestos product lines at this time.” It’s capitalism itself that corrupts these people.

Had plenty of friends from law school that seemed like decent people, now off defending and lobbying for insurance companies and energy companies.

JoBo ,

Your autocorrect changed “Depeche” to “Depth”, just in case anyone wanted to find the song.

mindlight ,

Just shoot me 😂

circuscritic , (edited )

People should read the articles on this. It wasn’t some massive campaign, or secret team, it was so so so much dumber, more petty, and small time.

He basically bitched at some underlings a few times and the result was a double digit amount of generic tweets that were just bland retorts to critics.

So this is embarrassing, and idiotic, but mostly it was pettiness into the void, but again, dumb as shit.

Should he be fired and/or publicly flogged? Probably for any number of reasons, just not these specific ones.

bernieecclestoned ,

6 tweets in 18 months…not really an army then is it?

riesendulli ,

More like a legion!

https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/c61760c4-e7b2-4188-bf61-d407eb9bb5ef.jpeg

Shalakushka ,
@Shalakushka@kbin.social avatar

I think it is 100% likely Paramount and other media companies are doing the same thing.

kubica ,
@kubica@kbin.social avatar

I wonder about the thought process where the conclusion is that this is a good idea.

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