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.
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.