quoms:

Another issue with allowing every company on Earth to masquerade as a “tech company” regardless of what they do is that Netflix’s CEO gets to pretend he runs some kind of neutral content platform, like Facebook, instead of what he actually does, which is run a TV and movie production company and distributor. These entities do not have the same relationship to the concept of free speech and censorship.

Yes, there’s an open question of whether Facebook should allow sharing and discussion of offensive or inflammatory content - maybe it’s a little more cut-and-dried if you think about whether Google should index that kind of content in its search results, or whether a public or school library should carry it and make it accessible to readers. But these are really fundamentally different things from talking about criticism of a company that directly pays someone millions of dollars to create that content, to bring it into the world, and does that in the hope of realizing a profit on the invested capital. That’s a business decision, and it reflects on the company.

If a publishing house is known for publishing white nationalists then they get called a “white nationalist publisher,” and fairly so. Netflix wants to have their cake and eat it too, in terms of making money by producing and distributing transphobic content but then not to be labeled a “transphobic producer.” And the way they’re making that argument is by pretending to be in the same position, neutrally mediating between content and consumer, as Facebook or Google. But even disregarding their role in producing that content, this only works if Netflix is the only way you are getting TV and movie content streamed to you online. And yes, that’s what Netflix wants, that’s how they originally envisioned their service as working, but that ship sailed a long time ago.

It’s very Silicon Valley-brained, but it’s also just depressingly neoliberal in the way it totally collapses the distinction between the public and private spheres. Censorship was formerly an abuse of the state that needed to be guarded against (this is why the First Amendment exists, and why public libraries are so narrowly constrained when it comes to restricting the use of their space); now it’s somehow wholly a corporate issue and it’s up to this brave company to protect us all from censorship by making baller money off of hate speech and telling anyone who complains to can it. It’s so disingenuous.