HBO Doesn’t Deny Accusations of Using Fake Twitter Accounts to Fight Critics Online

HBO won’t deny reports that executives within the company engaged in online trolling of movie critics, including Rolling Stone and Vulture writers who were less-than-impressed with recent projects. According to a lawsuit, pieces of which leaked earlier in the week, HBO and Max chief Casey Bloys directed subordinates to create sock puppet accounts on Twitter to insult and argue with prominent critics. The allegations made their way to Rolling Stone, who published them yesterday.

The lawsuit comes from former HBO executive assistant Sully Temori, who claims wrongful termination. The exact nature of Temori’s broader claims and termination have been overshadowed so far by very strong evidence that Bloys and at least one other HBO executive controlled an “army” of fake accounts that would be deployed to combat critics.

“HBO intends to vigorously defend against Mr. Temori’s allegations,” a spokesperson for the network said. “We are not going to comment on select exchanges between programmers and errant tweets.”

Temori’s lawsuit includes what appears to be numerous screenshots between himself, Kathleen McCaffrey, HBO’s senior vice president of drama programming, and Francesca Orsi, HBO’s head of drama. When he launched the lawsuit in July, The Hollywood Reporter says Temori launched it as a John Doe, claiming he had been fired as a result of his sexual orientation and disability. He names HBO, Warner Media, McCafrey, Orsi, The Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye), and two other executive producers on The Idol. Temori claims that he was bullied and harassed in an effort to pressure him to quit.

While the sock puppet accounts and fake tweets might seem unrelated to the hostile work environment claim, they are included in the lawsuit because Temori alleges that he was assigned “menial tasks” that had nothing to do with his job description.

Sock puppet accounts are exactly what they sound like: fake accounts created so that others can control them, usually in order to “win” online arguments by chiming in on the side of the person who controls the sock puppet account. Long used by bad-faith trolls fighting over low stakes nonsense, sock puppet accounts occasionally come up as part of something bigger. In recent months, a large YouTube creator was accused of using sock puppet accounts to harass and defame her ex-business partners, contributing to a cascade of further accusations of bad business conduct.

The irony in HBO’s case, of course, is that if true, the alleged behavior would have very little real effect on swaying its targets. Movie critics and other writers in the pop culture sphere are so used to being inundated with commentary about their work that it’s rare any one tweet or nasty comment is going to stand out and change the narrative, or in some cases even be seen.