I wonder if the same thing happens within/between companies. Industrial espionage is a thing. When billions of dollars are at stake, why not "cultural activities" too?
Isn't this effectively what is happening when a major media outlet writes a piece about how $SocialMediaCompany has a racist/sexist "bro" culture or allows racist/sexist $SocialMediaCeleb on their platform? As much as I dislike social media, a lot of these attacks have been made with only minimal substantive claims, so it seems like the real goal is to delegitimize (sabotage) the upcoming/ competing businesses.
It's a thing between teenage girls (and boys), it's not some new tactic. If you read about Ben Franklin, he was huge into the idea of secret societies of a small number of people. The primary reason was that they were immune to this type of dissent building and outside opinion influencing.
He structured secret societies like an MLM, where you only know you're direct downline, and your recruiters direct downline. Each secret society had 6 members, and each of the 6 members would create another one with 6 members, but never sharing the identities across the groups and instruct each of the six to replicate the structure and so on. Each group of 6 would meet, discuss topics, come to a group consensu, and pass this up and down. This is how the revolution and much more was fomented.