The HBO CEO and chairman Casey Bloys has apologised for directing employees to set up fake Twitter accounts to hit back at TV critics.
At a HBO event in New York, the executive responded to a report in Rolling Stone magazine which detailed text messages being prepared for a lawsuit brought by a former HBO employee.
The employee alleges to have been wrongfully terminated in a separate matter to his claim that he was asked to set up a fake account on Twitter, now known as X.
In alleged text messages sent in 2020 and 2021, which are being prepared as evidence in the case, Bloys and Kathleen McCaffrey, HBO's senior vice president of drama programming, discuss using fake Twitter accounts to reply to critics who spoke negatively about HBO shows including Mare of Easttown and Perry Mason.
During a presentation for HBO and Max's upcoming programming on Thursday, Bloys addressed the allegations.
According to Variety, he said: "For those of you who know me, you know that I am a programming executive very, very passionate about the shows that we decide to do.
"And the people who do them and the people who work on them. I want the shows to be great. I want people to love them. I want you all to love them. It’s very important to me what you all think of the shows.
"When you think about that, and then think of 2020 and 2021, I’m working from home and doing an unhealthy amount of scrolling through Twitter. And I come up with a very, very dumb idea to vent my frustration."
Bloys said the six tweets sent over 18 months was "not very effective" but apologised to those targeted.
"I do apologise to the people who were mentioned in the leaked texts," he said. "Obviously, nobody wants to be part of a story that they have nothing to do with."
The TV executive added that he now sends direct messages to journalists to express his feedback.
"But also, as many of you know, I have progressed over the past couple of years to using DMs," he continued.
"So now, when I take issue with something in a review, or take issue with something I see, many of you are gracious enough to engage with me in a back and forth and I think that is a probably a much healthier way to go about this."
