HBO accused of setting up fake accounts to respond to negative criticism on social media
A former HBO employee, Sully Temori, has alleged that company executives ordered staff to create fake social media accounts to reply to negative criticism.
In a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by Temori, he revealed that CEO Casey Bloys asked employees via text message to “go on a mission” and respond to critics online.
Bloys’ plan emerged when Kathryn VanArendonk, a writer for Vulture, indirectly posted on Twitter about HBO’s show Perry Mason a few days before it aired to the general public. VanArendonk wrote, “Please find some way to communicate male trauma besides showing me a flashback to the hero’s memories of trench warfare.”
Bloys then asked his team to find a way to send her a response from an account that couldn’t be traced back to HBO. He instructed the senior vice president of programming, Kathleen McCaffrey, to respond, suggesting, “Do you have a secret handle? Couldn’t we say especially given that it’s D-Day to dismiss a soldier’s experience like that seems pretty disrespectful … this must be answered!”
While the two decided not to reply to VanArendonk’s Tweet, this marked the start of their plan, and they subsequently asked Temori to be their “mole”.
From there, several more Twitter posts were planned via texts between Bloys and McCaffrey, which instructed an anonymous account to hit back at critics. Texts to Temori from McCaffrey reveal, “[Bloys] always texts me asking me to find friends to reply… is there a way to create a dummy account that can’t be traced to us to do his bidding.”
Several of the HBO-fabricated Tweets are still up, with a fake account using the name Kelly Shepherd to reply to negative reviews of shows with responses that mirror Bloys and McCaffreys’ demands nearly word-for-word.
After Alan Sepinwall gave a bad review to The Nevers, Temori received a text from McCaffrey instructing, “Can our secret operative please tweet at Alan’s review: ‘Alan is always predictably safe and scared in his opinions.’ And then we have to delete this chain right? Omg I just got scared lol.”
A post by Shepherd, supposedly a vegan aromatherapist from Texas, reads, “Alan is always predictably safe and scared in his opinions.”
With several cases suggesting that Bloys was, in fact, instructing employees to troll critics, HBO since told Rolling Stone, “HBO intends to vigorously defend against Mr. Temori’s allegations. We are not going to comment on select exchanges between programmers and errant tweets.”
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