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?

I've long thought _everything_ is already 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.