MAGA sure love some Netflix, at least when it comes to kickin’ the streamer’s butt around for political gain.
With 15 days to go before what looks to be a tight GOP primary vote on who will carry the Republican banner into the fall against Democrat James Talarico for a potentially hotly contested Senate seat, Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton today threw raw red meat to the base with a scorcher of a lawsuit against Netflix.
“Netflix’s endgame is simple and lucrative: get children and families glued to the screen, harvest their data while they are stuck there, and then monetize the data for a handsome profit,” the potentially multi-million suit says. “Netflix quietly built a behavioral-surveillance program of staggering scale. At bottom, this program requires getting Texans and their children glued to the screen and then extracting every possible piece of data about them while they are there,” the jury trial-seeking injunction petition filed today in court in the second largest state in the union goes on to say.
Tossing around terms like “bait and switch,” “logging company, and “deceptive conduct” amidst accusations of bad faith on the part of the Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters-run entertainment giant, Paxton, who has a tiny lead over fifth term seeking incumbent Senator John Cornyn, certainly aims to be a straight shooter – for what it’s worth.
Citing repeated violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (with penalties of $10K a violation — do the math), the filing adds: “To accomplish the first goal, Netflix deceptively designs its platform to be addictive. Netflix uses dark patterns to do this discreetly. Dark patterns are subtle features engineered to manipulate users to take the actions Netflix wants them to take.”
In a statement this afternoon, Paxton’s office spotlighted the lucrative bottom line of all this. “Netflix users’ data is essentially shopped across Big Ad Tech’s shadowy network,” the Lone Star AG said, emphasizing the lack of clear consent parents and children give the streamer to profiting from their info. “The company earns billions of dollars every year from secretly selling consumer data.”
Some may say, clutching their pearls or not, that that’s just capitalism in the Digital Era and don’t click Accept on the user agreement if you don’t like it. Others may say it is an outrage. Either way, Netflix respectfully disagrees with the honorable gentleman from the former Republic of Texas, to put it nicely.
“Respectfully to the great state of Texas and Attorney General Paxton, this lawsuit lacks merit and is based on inaccurate and distorted information,” a spokesperson for the streamer said Monday of Paxton’s injunction desiring barrage.
“Netflix takes our members’ privacy seriously and complies with privacy and data‑protection laws everywhere we operate,” they went on to say. “We look forward to addressing the Texas Attorney General’s allegations in court and further explaining our industry-leading, kid‑friendly parental controls and transparent privacy practices.”
The Netflix home screen (Photo:Getty)
Now, while there is no apparent official connection to Heritage Foundation spinoff the Oversight Project’s well-circulated Fedflix: Netflix, The Federal Government, and the New Propaganda State analysis that helped deep-six earlier this year any GOP support for the streamer’s ultimately failed $89 billion acquisition of Warner Bros in Paxton’s suit, they are certainly reading from the same hymn book, if you know what I mean? Donald Trump‘s “good friends” David Ellison and papa Larry Ellison eventually bought all of Warner Bros Discovery with a $111 billon bid. To that, like the unsuccessful but headline grabbin’ attack by a Texas state D.A. on the streamer several years back over assertions that coming-of-age drama Cutie was riddled with child pornography, today’s action has culture war burned into it.
Outside of Netflix itself, there’s also a bit of strange bedfellows here too, as much of Monday’s Texas filing reads like a cut and paste of the legal actions in California and from New Mexico’s state AG against Zuckerberg’s Meta and YouTube over their practices and algorithms, as well as their approach to luring the young on to their platforms and cashing in.
While appeals are already in motion or being planned in the Meta and YouTube cases in the Golden State and the Land of Enchantment, a win is still a win for prosecutors — and a win is so obviously what would-be Senator Paxton is looking for here.
It should also be noted that Trump very much put his thumb on the scale when it came to who got WBD (AKA – who will run CNN in a way POTUS likes), the ex-Apprentice host has not yet endorsed either Paxton or Cornyn before the May 26 run-off vote. MAGA loyalist Paxton may have gotten Trump’s attention now, with this Netflix lawsuit.
