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.
Everything counts in large amounts as Depth Mode once sang. Especially in the corporate world, everything is measured in “financial risk” and PR management costs. If Google can make $10 million in doing some shady shit they will sure as hell do it if the fines will be less than $100 thousand.
So, I have an idea… Whena large corporation is caught with their pants down… Let’s say a global fashion brand that got caught using child labor and the CEO cashed $20 million in bonuses…
Then the question for the CEO should not be “Are you sorry?” but “How sorry are you? Are you $500 thousand sorry? $1 million sorry? $10 million sorry? $50 million sorry?”
That’s how you create an interest in the leadership of corporations of actually taking responsibility of their actions.
HBO apologizing means nothing. They can and will probably similar shit in the future because no one actually loses anything they hold dear.
Law should have fines based on the amount the organization profited from the action, not just damages. Maybe go by whichever (damages or benefit) is higher?
I have personally seen the internal memos of multiple large companies from the 1970’s in which the executive wrote some version of “while the dangers of asbestos are clear, changing to another material would not help meet the financial goals of our asbestos product lines at this time.” It’s capitalism itself that corrupts these people.
Had plenty of friends from law school that seemed like decent people, now off defending and lobbying for insurance companies and energy companies.
Your autocorrect changed “Depeche” to “Depth”, just in case anyone wanted to find the song.
Just shoot me 😂