It reminds me of that case that I read about couple weeks back. In short, he Polish government paid youtubers to create an anti-crypto campaign in the media. It was a decent sum, more than 25k USD.
This is just another case of of companies having politicians in their pockets. It's good that corruption got exposed once again, but bad that he's not going to have to pay for this in any way. A politician that is lobbying for a business should be stripped of rank, covered in tar and feathers and kicked out of congress.
That was a couple of months ago if im not mistaken. Several youtubers were paid in some sort of FUD campaign, pretty revealing of how governments are trying to shift the popular opinion to be anti crypto.
I believe in other countries there other similar campaigns using social media influencers to do the same thing. Youtube is definitely a big weapon these days, so are twitter and other big virtual megaphones, governments will not hesitate to pay them to spread their agenda.
Then again, this is not new and im not surprised. The private sector pays influencers to do this too, the government is no different, except it's being done with our tax money.