Shadowrun may work as its own alternate timeline that starts at least as far back as 2012, but if someone were to try to align what we know in late 2024 with the setting, getting the incriminating “paydata” and sending it to some corpo media (or some rich failson narcissist pocaster) wouldn’t do much… and even if somehow the desire was there to get out what Damien Knight was up to (which was probably not as bad as 
at least in the books as written), all an Ares Macrotechnology corporate citizen would have to do is say “FAKE NEWS!” and keep on keeping on, going bazinga for the latest New Exciting Retail Product like always.
I decided to instead just make up a post-apocalyptic / cyberpunk / pirate setting with vampires and run it with Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but the group i got together for that couldn’t agree on a set weekday for playing and then i realized i smoke wayyyy too little weed nowadays to actually write something like that.
Once, I tried to run a Star-Wars-Like with energy swords and space magic but with the magic cops not there and a lot more blatant swashbuckling, but too many people wanted the brand labeling.