From a fight over money to claims about underage trafficking at a Thai brothel, the drama over “The Blacklist” is on another level.

At its peak, The Blacklist was the front page of the internet for the U.S. cannabis industry.

Lured by an intoxicating “user generated” mix of insider leaks, industry rumor and gossip, and aggregated content that appeared to be copy-pasted directly from reputable news sources and spun into viral social-media posts, The Blacklist built an audience now totaling more than 400,000 Instagram followers. The result was “the most disruptive force in weed,” as cannabis website MerryJane described the outfit after interviewing one of The Blacklist’s shadowy, “anonymous” operators in 2019.

In its own words aspiring to be the putative “TMZ of cannabis,” The Blacklist at times showed an unfiltered, unreliable, and darker side.

It was alleged without conclusive evidence in industry circles that negative posts could be made to disappear for a few thousand dollars, a practice popular Instagram celebrity and cannabis entrepreneur Berner suggested was “extortionist” in an interview with SF Weekly last year. (The Blacklist rejected the claims as lacking evidence and “libelous” at the time.) They have also responded to claims that unvetted information has been published by pointing to legal protections for the hosts of user-generated content. [Read More @ The Daily Beast]