I've been a member of this board for a loooong time. Long enough that I was still an adolescent who was actively reading the SaveDisney stuff back when it was new. This is one of the craziest and most interesting events to ever happen on here. I've never had any doubt that Disney has plants in online fan communities. It's an unfortunate reality of the modern internet and something that is heavily practiced by every company/political campaign/what have you. It's very easy to manipulate the narrative by simply hiring people to create a bunch of fake social media accounts to reinforce what they want the public to think. I've always had a hunch that some of the "insiders" here were not just some information-privy individuals risking their careers and integrity to bring us the inside scoop. It should be no surprise to anyone when certain things get "leaked", that the leak was intentional. Whenever you see someone ruthlessly defending a controversial decision by Disney and trying to paint the people reacting negatively as obsessive fanboys, it's very easy to assume these people are Disney shills. Heck, even in this forum's Universal Orlando subforum, there are a handful of posters whom I would not be surprised to discover are Universal shills whose goal is to spin any negative criticism of Universal as Disney fanboy bias.
I've also always suspected that Disney also scouts the boards and treats them as focus groups. This is why I tend to post a lot of criticisms - I want Disney to see them and address them.
This entire discussion in both threads has already become cacophonous and convoluted, so I think it's important that we don't lose the biggest shocker and important takeaway here: (ignoring all the pointed fingers of what poster is actually who), the reveal that a company would deliberately push negative criticism of itself to spin the narrative that it wants. That highest ranking individuals in a company can manipulate public opinion with social media to throw their opponents under the bus. The implication that Bob Iger played dirty to get where he is. Of course, I don't believe anyone in any position of high ranking power got there without stabbing a few backs.
That's also ignoring the fact that we could go even deeper down the rabbit hole - maybe Disney themselves wrote the expose to discredit the insiders and tear apart the community so that only the shills pushing the discussions they want continue to be trusted. *tightens tinfoil hat*