During a Senate hearing examining the proposed Netflix-Warner Brothers merger, the online content viewing giant faced questions from conservative senators about what they characterized as politically biased and “woke” content on the platform.
Senator Josh Hawley confronted Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos about children’s programs, stating: “Why is it that so much of Netflix content for children promotes a transgender ideology? Almost half of your content for children now, I’m talking about minor children now, I’m not talking about teenagers, minor children, promotes a transgender ideology agenda.”
The senator referenced recent medical findings, noting: “I was just looking at the data here from your various series, various series. And what concerns me is just two days ago, a jury in New York awarded a former transitioner $2 million because she said that her psychologists and others pressured her into, they pushed on her an ideology that proved to be extremely detrimental.”
Hawley pressed further on his concerns as a parent: “My personal experience is that my three children, I can’t let them watch anything they want on Netflix. I can’t let them watch anything on Netflix unless I preview it because I don’t have confidence in what’s on your platform. I don’t know what they’re going to encounter.”
Senator Eric Schmitt expanded on these concerns, stating: “Netflix content is synonymous for the modern phenomenon of race swapping both historical and real and fictional characters. Just a few examples. Netflix made black Vikings. Netflix changed Cleopatra from Macedonian to black. Achilles changed from Greek to black.”
Schmitt also referenced past Netflix social media posts, quoting from June 2020: “On its ex page, Netflix posted a video titled, quote, ‘To my white friends, guilt, shame, embarrassment.We need to do everything in our power to amplify that message.'”
When Sarandos said he had no recollection of the post, Schmitt responded: “I just read it to you. Do you have an opinion about it?”
The senator later stated: “You have Susan Rice on your board, the founder of sort of Barack Obama’s DEI agenda. 99% of your employees contribute to Democrats to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Your content’s over s*xualized for kids. You’re engaged in this very woke programming overwhelmingly.”
Schmitt concluded: “So the question before this committee and you come before Congress, why in the world would we give a seal of approval or a thumbs up to make you the largest behemoth on the planet related to content? It seems as though you have engaged in creating not only a monopoly of content potentially, but the wokest content in the history of the world.”
Sarandos defended Netflix throughout the hearing, stating: “Netflix has no political agenda of any kind.” He added: “I would say that of all the American values that we all share and I understand parenthood is hard, I understand it’s a difficult world that we all navigate, but the one we value a lot is the first amendment, a lot of that is freedom of speech.”
The Netflix executive maintained: “We have millions of hours of children’s programming.” He emphasized that Netflix provides tools for parents to manage content, explaining: “We have state of the art tools for you to manage those choices for your children and to block any title that you might be offended by for any reason.”
