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Netflix's Bow to Saudi Censors Comes at a Cost to Free Speech
- detcader 8y agoThey're just doing what million-dollar-per-day US military aid beneficiary Israel has been doing for a while now [0]. Anyone have the link to that NY Times editorial? [0] https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-deleting-accounts-at-the-direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments/ https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele... Edit: Seems this comment was flagged. Sorry for any incitement!
- cm2187 8y agoI thought the whole rationale of the de-platforming movement was that free speech doesn't apply to private companies and institutions, they are free to host whatever content they want and have whatever political bias they want. If that is the case why shouldn't it apply to Netflix too?
- detcader 8y ago"Free speech" as a value is different from free speech protections from government interference. Maybe the former needs a new name...
- Rapzid 8y agoFree speech the value is about the government. Free speech is always about the government.
- tome 8y agoIs it? Do you have sources to back that up? In principle it seems like it's a concept that could apply equally to freedom from retribution from one's family/local community/internet service provider.
- detcader 8y agoIt's true that some people think this. Other people think the 1st Amendment exists for a reason less simplistic than "a government shouldn't censor people," something to do with a healthy human society: https://theintercept.com/2014/08/21/twitter-facebook-executives-arbiters-see-read/ https://theintercept.com/2014/08/21/twitter-facebook-executi... This is not to argue that the 1st Amendment should compel anything beyond protection from government censorship, but that the value it exists to promote applies to wider situations
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoHow does it not apply to Netflix? Just because they have the right to censor stuff, doesn't mean that you have to agree with any particular instance of their censorship, does it?
- cm2187 8y agoI am not defending Netflix. I think Silicon Valley companies pushing a political agenda using their platforms is reprehensible, particularly given the high level of concentration. However I merely point the contradiction between the New York Times cheering for the de-platforming movement and then complaining about Netflix in name of Free Speech.
- acdha 8y agoYou’re missing the difference between public and private actions. If Netflix decides not to carry a particular film, that’s entirely up to them and their customers and competitors are free to make other decisions. If the government requires something, as in this case, that’s the kind of thing free speech advocates worry about because it has the full weight of the state behind it.
- Shivetya 8y agoSorry, either stop trading with these countries or acquiesce to their demands. You cannot have both. Just as a private citizen cannot just waltz into one of these countries and do as they please "because I can do this at home" why should we expect a private company to do as such? Simply put, if our government will not why do we feel we should hold private companies to a higher standard?
- rayiner 8y agoCompanies like Netflix and Google have leverage they could be using for good.
- oaiey 8y agoAnd they should. However, they need to comply first to local law and then lobby to change something.
- bedhead 8y agoThese are profit-seeking enterprises, not political activist organizations. I don't know why more people confuse the two. This is a rabbit hole companies need to be very careful about going down. Besides, this whole thing is irony of the highest order. We scream bloody murder about Saudi Arabia explicitly censoring a comedian, meanwhile in the US we have an arguably worse form of implicit censorship where if you make an offensive (and harmless) joke, a bunch of noisy leftist maniacs go into high gear to end your career.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoThey're only exclusively profit seeking if owners/controllers agree for it to be so. To me it seems extremely strange to put financial profit above humanity, or above morality. It's not confusion, it's choice.
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- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
- mc32 8y agoHuh. I thought because Netflix is a private company what they do isnt censorship. So Google, Facebook, Twitter can moderate content as they see fit, be it to please a market or local sensibilities. I’m happy to see thr NYT see content moderation as a curb on speech though. As others said, if you’re okay with abiding by GDPR, then you’re okay with abiding by laws and regulations of other locales like China, Russia and Saudi.
- ng12 8y agoNetflix is GDPR compliant although that almost definitely violates the first amendment. To operate in foreign countries you have to abide by their rules. I'm much more concerned by Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, et al censoring Americans.
- krstf13 8y agoEU is 500M people Saudi Arabia is 40M Also, GDPR doesn’t ‘almost definitely violates the first amendment’, GDPR wasn’t passed by Congress. A GDPR-like rule might violate the first amendment if you allow a really extensive definition of speech, and even in such a setting there would be a lot of room to argue.
- ng12 8y ago> GDPR wasn’t passed by Congress. That's the point. Neither were SA's censorship laws. You have to conform to laws that wouldn't fly in the USA to do business in other countries.
- krstf13 8y agoI don’t think it’s a valid comparison though because market sizes aren’t the same and because viewing GDPR as a free speech is far from obvious (it actually requires yogi master like bending abilities) You could argue that anti hate speech laws in some European countries (eg France) are the same. It’s also not necessarily correct that ‘you have to conforms to laws ... to do business in other countries’. Many trades treaties supersede local laws also, when there’s political will it’s perfectly possible to restrict what private businesses can do abroad (eg Iran).
- ng12 8y ago> market sizes aren’t the same I'm not sure why this matters, I'm sure they make enough money from SA users to justify region-locking specific episodes. > it’s perfectly possible to restrict what private businesses can do abroad This is not relevant. An appropriate example would be a company operating in a foreign country where they willfully ignore that country's laws.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoWell, it against the (Saudi) law, so Netflix can't show it in Saudi Arabia. I hope they draw a line in the sand when it comes to other countries, i.e., remove the episode worldwide, but I think for individual countries the battle is lost. Even Germany has laws curtailing what we, in USA call "Free speech" (for obvious reasons they are sensitive about Nazi propaganda.) In USA you can say virtually all things, but you'll lose your job or sponsors, er...your paycheck. So censorship is done by private entities.
- oaiey 8y agoAs a German I want to write exactly this. By all means we are a country with good laws and everything. But we have restrictions on free speech. For very good reasons. We are proud of this and see it as something positive (when you ignore the 1% who are actually restricted). Netflix and other global companies have these kind of challenges. They are pretty used to it (imagine food or drug regulations). There is just a group of media/digital companies who grew their business niche too fast and are now surprised that local laws and regulations show up. The GDPR, free speech limitations, different social systems, SJW incompatibilities, etc are just samples of all of this. And I want to highlight, that I do neither like consequences like this. I like my movies uncut, healthy discussion (eg about the monarchy) and equal right for minorities.
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- mscasts 8y agoIt is real easy. When they want to limit your product with censorship and other evil things, do not do business there. Perhaps they will come around when their people starts screaming for these kind of services. If all companies just adhere to their rules, well the population will probably never require the change that they should because it will be good enough so the dangerous path of complaining is not worth it.
- tanilama 8y agoDidn't see the problem. If Free Speech isn't respected in SA, Netflix can't fix it.
- 21 8y agoFree speech is a Western value. Tying to impose it on the rest of the world is yet another colonization. True diversity is allowing other cultures to live by different values.
- adamc 8y agoThe diversity of allowing theocracies isn't one I am particularly interested in supporting.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoSo, true diversity in your opinion requires that we allow some king to torture and kill people who are too diverse?
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoWhatever "true diversity" is it's not worth having unless _people_ can choose their own values to some extent, IMO. Fascist cultures should not be tolerated, fascist people should (inasmuch as their fascism does not impact others against those other's own wills, of course). Demanding SA allow freedom for individuals to exercise their own conscience would be supporting a morally defensible notion of diversity. One major problem is that some religions (eg Islam) and religious groups (eg Mormons) have central ideologies that are antithetical to freedom of conscience; making them incompatible with many freedoms associated with democratic societies (speech, thought, association).
- yakshaving_jgt 8y agoIn much of MENA, female genital mutilation is a cultural norm. Are you saying that “true diversity” is allowing small girls to have their clitorises cut off?
- tangent128 8y agoThat's just another way of saying "you should tolerate intolerance", and the fallacy is the same. Saudi Arabia and China are not cultural monoliths. Their ruling classes may have a cultural value of stamping out dissenting values, but their subcultures so targeted would certainly disagree.
- adamc 8y agoSaudi Arabia is an oppressive theocracy. That's not news. Have we decided American companies can only trade with democracies? That would be news.
- 2trill2spill 8y agoI don't understand this article. If Saudi Arabia does not have free speech how is Netflix suppose to up hold it there? Also Free Speech is a right/protection from the government it doesn't have anything to do with private companies like Netflix. Finally the author acts like free speech is universal, "As America’s new media overlords grow at a stunning rate, expanding into every nook and cranny of the globe where governments will let them in, are they compelled to defend universal values like free speech that their home country was founded on?" The majority of countries don't have free speech like the United States does, so I wouldn't call it a universal value.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoFreedom of speech is a concept, in USA there is a specific protection to prevent government from inhibiting free speech in certain ways. That doesn't mean that non-government persons are unable to inhibit free speech. It's curious that USA's media corporations' [gamut of] values do get promoted through their productions. In more open societies they're just presented as is.
- 2trill2spill 8y agoThat's not how it works in the United States. As a non government entity Netflix is perfectly within their right to censor or restrict their customers any way they see fit, as long as they don't discriminate based on gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. Also It seems people in Saudi Arabia have no right to freedom of speech unlike in the United States.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoCould you say that again, I can't see how it disagrees with anything I said. Also, AIUI Netflix can discriminate so long as it's consistent with the concept of "positive discrimination". So they can say "we're not having your show because you're a white male", or "we want you to include a homosexual lead character", or similar.
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- austincheney 8y agoArticles like this make me angry. Suddenly its a big deal because Saudi Arabia was thrust into the news for the Khashoggi murder. It has always been a cultural norm for certain kinds of censorship to occur regularly and the subjects of censorship differ by nation. I am an American who is currently living in Kuwait and spent about 3.5 years between Kuwait and Afghanistan. In Kuwait you do not talk negatively about religion. This actually against the law and is largely how Kuwait avoids religious strife that infects other regions. In many nations here you don't talk negatively in public about the current national politics, though the acceptable tone differs by nation. In nearly all the nations here sex does not belong in any form of media. All matters of sex are private and to be kept within the household. Cursing in public is also generally bad. The allowed dress of people in media differs by nation as well. In many areas they play American movies in public theaters, but will edit out parts that violate the local cultural norms. Remember that Sex In The City 2 was filmed in UAE, but I don't believe it was available in the cinema there. None of this is new. The cultural challenge that nations face here is how to become modern without losing their unique identify and cultural legacies. The different countries are evolving on this matter at different speeds and prefer to accommodate for various different demands local.
- detcader 8y ago> largely how Kuwait avoids religious strife that infects other regions That's really interesting, can you provide a source on this causal relationship?
- austincheney 8y agoI am not sure. Here are some areas to get you started on your own research * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_Kuwait https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_Kuwai... * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Kuwait_mosque_bombing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Kuwait_mosque_bombing * https://news.kuwaittimes.net/website/freedom-speech-kuwait/ https://news.kuwaittimes.net/website/freedom-speech-kuwait/
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
- devwastaken 8y agoI don't blame them at all. If anything the censor has made it all the more popular, and those who are curious will seek it out. It's either censor certain episodes, or there's no Netflix at all.
- porpoisely 8y agoOnly if the NYTimes cared as much about the "cost to free speech" in the US. The NYTimes, along with other large media companies, have been the biggest advocates of tech censorship of americans. They forced google, facebook, twitter, etc to censor ordinary americans. Makes it hard for me to take them seriously when it comes to censorship. And I fully understand the argument of government vs private company. But the outcome is still the same - censorship. Whether content is censored at the behest of the saudis or the nytimes is meaningless to me. It's the spirit of free speech rather than the law. Saudi Arabia has been censoring for decades. And the NYTimes has been more or less fine with that. Why the sudden change? Because the saudis are supporting Trump and vice versa? In 2008, when obama won, the nytimes and much of the media was hailing social media as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Since 2016, a complete shift. I wonder why? The biggest disappoint for me is the realization that the NYTimes, just like foxnews and the rest of the major news companies, are politically driven rather than driven by morality or truth. If the saudis had been relentlessly mocking Trump rather than supporting him, I suspect the NYTimes article would be defending the saudis - along the lines of "when in rome..." or more likely, they wouldn't have bother writing anything. Supporting the regime and censorship by omission. Also, I've noticed a significant drop in zuckerburg or facebook hitpieces by the media ever since his new year's message where he promised to get in line and censor like other major tech companies. I guess that means less anti-facebook spam, but more censorship online.