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.

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?

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.

I've long thought _everything_ is already like this.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Um, the organization is real. The "grass roots" part of it is clearly fake.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.