It reminds me of The Chronicle's exhorting ordinary people to support the then-underway cause intended to banish Uber and Lyft from Austin, on ostensibly populist grounds, when in reality the cause was aimed at preserving the commercial interests of an entrenched, unworthy industry. I saw a similar thing with the popular sentiment against Facebook's PATENTS.txt—a clever hack on par with copyleft which had the prospect of making patent trolls' weapons ineffective, subverted by a meme that ended with people convinced to work against their own interests and in favor of the trolls.

Maybe it's worth coining a new term ("anti-rebellion"?) for this sort of thing. Se also: useful idiot