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Comment by Miner49er | Hacker News Reader

Whether or not you agree with Netflix or not, they are being hypocritical and inconsistent. They went and removed a bunch of shows for having blackface last year (from what I can see, used typically or maybe always for comedy and often in a way that's making fun of racism.) [1] Yet now their CEO is defending this new show and saying, "Adults can watch violence, assault and abuse – or enjoy shocking stand-up comedy – without it causing them to harm others." [2]

If so, then why not re-add the previously censored content?

[1] https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/blackface-tv-episodes-scenes...

[2] https://variety.com/2021/film/news/ted-sarandos-dave-chappel...

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Netflix is simply following public opinion. As far as I can tell, most Americans think that blackface is wrong.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/11/about-a-thi...

By comparison, most Americans think that gender is determined by your sex at birth.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/08/transgender...

Platforms like Netflix do have to draw a line somewhere. The question is just where the line should be.

I'm sure most Americans also believe that rape and murder are wrong (unless done in some far away desert by the military), yet such acts are featured prominently on Netflix.

Are we really to believe that this [1] is such a horrible act of racism that must be cens... sanitized from history forever?

[1] https://youtu.be/LKjW5s3tXlo

I think you're misreading that first link. It seems that only 37% of adults think that blackface is never acceptable. That's actually less then the gender one you linked.

Plus that first link is specifically asked about use in a Halloween costume.

I was adding "rarely acceptable" and "never acceptable" to get the sum total of "negative opinions", I think that's reasonable to summarize a poll with many options as yes-or-no. The Halloween thing isn't great, but it's all I could find....

I think that many of the censored episodes would fall under the rare times it is acceptable, though, but I suppose that is just my opinion.

I'd say the situations look worse here. Most of the blackface I'm aware of that got removed was mocking racism (community), or the lack of nuance around what makes something racism (always sunny). Both were fairly obviously not condoning it.

This content directly mocks trans people and makes assertions that they're not legitimate. It's as far as I can tell, not a fictitious situation, just part of a routine. Seems like a real blunder to greenlight this imo. This is lacking nuance to the level of making fun of asians for having squinty eyes or black people for big lips.

I think the situation here is worse too because the CEO used Netflix's publishing of the documentary Disclosure, which directly calls out the harm of jokes such as Chappelle's, as part of the defense that the company itself isn't anti-trans, which feels a bit too much like the hypocrisy of saying "we posted a documentary about the horrible harm that blackface does so we are 'allowed' to post our own blackface stuff". It doesn't work that way.

Am I misremembering or was the community blackface episode actually blueface.

Definitely black. Chang is roleplaying as a dark elf in D&D and goes full black face. He claims it is not a racial thing but is immediately ejected from the group.

Here's a link: https://youtu.be/oRkcsuMcrEA?t=79

Thanks for sharing that list, it definitely challenged some of my preconceptions. As someone who watched The Closer and didn't think it went too far, I think most would agree that there should be some fixed line to judge what goes too far and shouldn't be on their platform. It's sad that this line doesn't seem to be determined by any principles -- or at least any explicit principles. These 2 examples make me think the "principles" being followed are 1) Money, and 2) PR/current events (George Floyd protests in the case of removing episodes with blackface).

"I think most would agree that there should be some fixed line to judge what goes too far and shouldn't be on their platform."

I can see the need for things like parental filters, or better user controls to be able to get recommendations for things you actually want to see.

I would also be the first person to agree that Netflix has the right to decide what content they want to distribute.

But from a customer point of view what I want from Netflix is to give give me maximum choice. Give me absolutely every kind of content imaginable, offensive or G-rated, and then give me the tools to be able to limit what my children can view and to fine tune the sorts of recommendations I get.

I'm a huge believer in "if you don't like it, watch something else" and "if someone else likes it, that's none of your business."

Unfortunately, from a business perspective, there will always be a trade off of "buying a license to X means we can't afford to license Y or Z". They spent millions to get this special, and probably could have gotten a dozen works from less-famous comedians for that same money.

That's driven by how many people will watch it (demonstrably, very many, in Chappelle's case), not by the magnitude of offense taken by some number of people.

The proportion of people not watching a show will always be far higher than those watching it, so there's room for offense from non-watchers to drive product decisions. The parent comment is saying that he doesn't want that to factor in at all, which is orthogonal to the question of Netflix needing to allocate resources between content.

It's the same conundrum as some open source projects who put up a BLM banner at the height of the protests last year. How do you ever remove it now? Not that the issues have been fixed but there's more than one issue in the world and you're a json library.

I encountered this for the first time just this week and it felt so awkward and out of place.

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