Last year, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings defended his company for giving in to censorship by the government of Saudi Arabia by saying, “We’re not trying to do ‘truth to power.’ We’re trying to entertain.”
Last Friday, the massively popular online streaming service proved it, publishing a report documenting multiple instances in which Netflix caved to censorship demands by governments around the world over the past five years.
In total, Netflix reported that it had yanked nine titles from its service in response to government demands—with five of those censorship demands coming from the government of Singapore alone.
The censorship demand that prompted Hastings’ “truth to power” remark involved an episode of the political satire show Patriot Act, starring Hasan Minhaj, an American comedian of Indian-Muslim descent. In the episode, Minhaj ridiculed the government of Saudi Arabia and its ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, for its repressive policies and the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
“We don’t feel bad at all” about censoring Patriot Act in Saudi Arabia, Hastings said.
But Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos later tried to walk back his boss’s remarks.
“I think all entertainment is truth to power—all creative expression is truth to power,’ Sarandos said. “Stand-up comedy is certainly truth to power.”
Nonetheless, Netflix also listed eight other incidents in which it failed to “do truth to power,” including complying with a demand by the government of New Zealand to remove the 2006 film The Bridge, an eerie documentary about people who have committed suicide by leaping off of San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge (approximately 2,000 since the bridge was opened in 1937). The Kiwi government classifies the film as “objectionable,” apparently.
In 2017, the German government demanded that Netflix remove the zombie horror classic Night of the Living Dead, which is banned in that country, while the same year, the Vietnamese government ordered Netflix to remove the Stanley Kubrick-directed, 1987 Vietnam war film Full Metal Jacket.
Of five pieces of content taken down from Netflix in Singapore, to comply with that government’s demands, three dealt with cannabis. The reality show Cooking On High is a culinary competition in which contestants must prepare recipes that contain enough of the drug to get the judges stoned, while The Legend of 420 is a documentary feature about the history of pot.
The TV series Disjointed, a sitcom starring Kathy Bates as the owner of a Los Angeles marijuana dispensary, was also ordered removed from Netflix in Sinagpore.
The final two Netflix titles banned in Singapore were The Last Hangover, a Brazilian comedy in which Jesus gets blackout drunk at the Last Supper, and the 1988 Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ, a controversial retelling of the New Testament Jesus story, based on a 1955 novel.
Photo By Coolcaesar / Wikimedia Commons
