Netflix's Surrender Has Already Begun
A CEO calling his own company's past a "mistake." A 47-page report designed to be cited, not read. The pressure campaign that broke Facebook is back for Netflix.
On Tuesday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos sat in the Dirksen Senate Office Building to answer questions about his company’s $83 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s studios, HBO, and HBO Max. The hearing was supposed to be about antitrust.
And some of it was! Sen. Mike Lee, the Republican chairing the subcommittee, called the deal “extraordinary in both scale and potential consequence” and pushed Sarandos on whether YouTube really counts as a competitor. Sen. Cory Booker raised concerns about any single company gaining that much control over American entertainment. Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked about subscription pricing. These are real questions about a merger that would reshape the entertainment industry. They deserve a hearing.
But several Republican senators had a different agenda. Sen. Eric Schmitt pulled up a Netflix social media post from June 2020, made in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. He presented it as though Netflix had issued a statement reading “To my white friends, guilt, shame, embarrassment.” In fact, the post promoted a video by Brandon Kyle Goodman, a writer on Big Mouth and co-star of Feel The Beat, that carried that title. Schmitt asked Sarandos what it meant. Sarandos, who said he was unaware of the post, didn’t correct the mischaracterization. Instead, he called it a mistake. “As I said, sir, we have no political agenda,” he told Schmitt. “Posting something like that would be quite political. Right, I would agree. Yes, and I would hope that wouldn’t happen again.”
The CEO of Netflix, under pressure from a senator, publicly disavowed his own company’s social media activity from six years earlier. The post in question was a statement of solidarity with Black Americans during a period of nationwide protests against police violence. Sarandos called it a mistake and promised it wouldn’t happen again.
Schmitt wasn’t done. He accused Netflix of “promoting DEI and wokeness,” cited examples of what he called “race swapping” in Netflix shows, brought up the French film Cuties, and had an aide hold up a headline from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze reading “Netflix Merger Would Create A Woke Media Monster.” He then delivered his closing argument: “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.”
Sen. Josh Hawley took a similar approach. He asked Sarandos why Netflix content for children “promotes a transgender ideology,” then claimed that “almost half” of Netflix’s children’s programming features “highly controversial, highly sexualized material.” CNN noted that Hawley didn’t provide a source for that statistic. Sarandos called the claim “inaccurate” and said he had no idea where it came from.
The “almost half” figure traces to a December 2025 report from Concerned Women for America, a conservative advocacy organization that opposes LGBTQ rights. CWA claimed that 41% of G-rated and TV-Y7 Netflix shows contain LGBTQ content. Their methodology is opaque: no named researchers, no published classification criteria, no inter-rater reliability testing. When a show like She-Ra and the Princesses of Power gets counted because two characters kiss in the final season, and that gets lumped under “highly sexualized material aimed at children,” you’re looking at a document designed to produce the largest possible number. The point was never to withstand scrutiny. The point was to be cited.
And that’s exactly what Hawley did. By the time it landed in the congressional record, it was a statistic attributed to a United States senator.
But Hawley and Schmitt weren’t freelancing. The culture-war attacks at the hearing echoed an anti-Netflix report produced by a conservative outlet originally created by the Heritage Foundation, which had been shared with allies ahead of the Tuesday hearing. Deadline reported that senators Cruz and Schmitt “seemed to be pulling directly from” the report, and that the head of the organization that produced it had pre-written questions for senators to use during the hearing.
That report is called Fedflix: Netflix, The Federal Government, and the New Propaganda State. It runs 47 pages. It was produced by the Oversight Project, an investigative arm of the Heritage Foundation (though it became formally independent last year). Its central claim is that Netflix holds “an outsized role in socially engineering millions of Americans into a predisposition to accept preferred leftwing ideological dogma.”
And tucked into its recommendations is the real tell. The report calls on “relevant federal agencies” to “scrutinize with extreme intensity any potential Netflix acquisitions of other media and entertainment companies.” It never mentions Warner Bros. by name. It never mentions Paramount by name. But the timing, the distribution list, and the recommendation structure make the purpose clear: this is a document aimed at the pending merger review, delivered to the people who will decide its fate.
Mike Howell, the head of the Oversight Project, told Deadline that his team has “been tracking domestic propaganda for some time” and that the Netflix deal “seemed like an opportune moment to raise this issue.” A GOP insider told the same outlet to “pay attention to President Trump’s use of monopoly when discussing this deal. That’s the message the administration’s sending to Sarandos, that’s how they’ll put their feet to the fire.”
Sure enough, Trump had already been using that language. Back in December, he told reporters at the Kennedy Center that the Netflix-WB combination involves “a big market share” and “could be a problem.” On January 11, while the Golden Globes were airing, he reposted a One America News article by attorney John Pierce titled “Stop the Netflix Cultural Takeover.” Pierce, who has represented January 6 defendants, argued that the DOJ should block the deal to protect “free expression and America’s cultural pluralism.” The article advocated for Paramount’s competing bid instead.
Paramount, of course, is run by David Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison is one of Trump’s closest allies in the tech world. Paramount’s chief legal officer, Makan Delrahim, served as the head of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division during Trump’s first term. A Trump administration official had previously suggested, before the bidding process even started, that “the Warner board needs to think very seriously not just on the price competition, but which player in the suitor pool has been successful getting a deal done.” That was about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
So here’s where we are. The Oversight Project, a Heritage Foundation spinoff, produced a 47-page report full of factual errors, unverifiable statistics, and advocacy group studies dressed up as independent research. That report was delivered to the White House and to the Senate subcommittee chair. Its head pre-wrote questions for senators to ask. Republican senators then performed those questions on camera while the CEO of Netflix squirmed, praised Trump for being “nothing but interested in protecting and creating American jobs,” and called it “wholly proper for the President of the United States to talk to leaders of industry.” Meanwhile, the actual decision on the merger sits with a Department of Justice run by an administration that has already signaled which side it prefers.
After the hearing, Sarandos told Deadline he “thought it went well.”
If any of this feels familiar, it should. Because this is the exact same playbook that was run against Facebook starting in 2016. The same institution. The same type of document. The same congressional theater. The same early capitulation by a CEO who thinks he can appease his way out of it. The only difference is that Facebook wasn’t trying to get government approval for a deal.
And we know how that one ended.
The nine-year dress rehearsal
If you want to understand what happens next for Netflix, you can just look at what already happened to Facebook. The playbook is the same. The institution running it is the same. Several of the individual players are the same.
It started in May 2016, when Gizmodo published an article headlined “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News.” The piece was based primarily on one anonymous source who worked as a contractor on Facebook’s “Trending Topics” feature. Gizmodo noted that “other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news,” and that “there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.” Facebook’s own internal review found no evidence of systematic bias.
But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the accusation existed, and that it could be weaponized.
Within days, Senator John Thune sent an official letter demanding answers. And on May 18, 2016, Mark Zuckerberg convened a meeting at Facebook headquarters with 16 conservative media figures and activists. The guest list included Tucker Carlson (then at the Daily Caller), Glenn Beck (The Blaze), Dana Perino (Fox News), and Jim DeMint (then president of the Heritage Foundation). Zuckerberg listened, apologized, and promised to examine the company’s practices more closely.
The meeting produced a minor spectacle when Beck and Carlson feuded publicly afterward over who had been more obsequious. But it also worked. Three months later, Facebook fired its entire Trending Topics editorial team and replaced them with an algorithm.
The results were immediate. Within three days, a completely fabricated story about Megyn Kelly being fired from Fox News was trending on Facebook. A Washington Post investigation of the following six weeks found “five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate,” including a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Facebook knew it had a fake news problem, but it was never deployed because executives were too afraid the tool would upset conservatives.
This was the lesson that would repeat for the next nine years: every concession invited more pressure. Every apology confirmed the accusation.
In 2018, Facebook formalized the relationship. The company brought in former Republican Senator Jon Kyl to conduct an “audit” of conservative bias concerns. The Heritage Foundation was enlisted to convene meetings between Facebook executives and conservative organizations. No progressive or civil rights groups were given a parallel role. The Kyl audit interviewed 133 conservatives. When the results were released in August 2019, the report offered no statistical analysis, no data on moderation decisions, no evidence of systematic discrimination. As Slate observed: “The conspicuous absence of evidence within the audit suggests what many media researchers already knew: Allegations of political bias are political theater.”
But the audit still produced policy changes. Facebook agreed to allow ads featuring images of people with medical tubes, which conservatives had argued was unfairly restricting anti-abortion content. The company hired staff specifically to work with “right-of-center organizations.” It promised to review its practices. For years, the platform became increasingly right-leaning.
And then, in January 2025, the whole edifice collapsed.
On January 7, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would eliminate its third-party fact-checking program entirely, replacing it with user-generated “community notes” modeled on Elon Musk’s system at X. He used language that could have been written by his critics: fact-checkers had been “too politically biased,” content moderation had become “censorship,” and Trump’s election represented “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
Three days later, the company ended its DEI programs. It disbanded its diversity team. It stopped requiring managers to source candidates from underrepresented groups. Its chief diversity officer was moved to a different role.
The context for these changes was clarifying. Zuckerberg had traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump. Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Zuckerberg ran his plans to roll back diversity programs past Trump adviser Stephen Miller before announcing them. Joel Kaplan, the Republican operative who had been elevated to head of global policy, told Fox News that the changes were directly related to the new administration. Zuckerberg attended Trump’s inauguration and sat among the tech executives on the dais.
In May 2024, Meta had hired a former Heritage Foundation fellow and author of the Intelligence Community chapter of Project 2025, Dustin Carmack, to help shape the company’s approach to content moderation. The same institution that produced the Fedflix report about Netflix was already embedded in Meta’s policy apparatus.
When Trump was asked at a press conference whether he thought Zuckerberg was “directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past,” his answer was one word: “Probably.”
May 2016 to January 2025. A single Gizmodo article, built on an anonymous source claiming bias that multiple reviews couldn’t verify, eventually produced total capitulation. The intervening years included a meeting with conservative luminaries, the firing of the editorial team that might have prevented fake news from spreading, an audit conducted by a partisan former senator in partnership with the Heritage Foundation, years of incremental policy changes designed to appease critics who could never be appeased, and finally the complete surrender.
What Ted Sarandos did in that Senate hearing room makes a lot more sense when you map it against this timeline. And the main difference is that Netflix has something Facebook didn’t: a concrete transaction that requires government approval. If the playbook worked over nine years when the pressure was purely reputational and regulatory, imagine what it can do when the administration holds the power to block a deal worth tens of billions of dollars.
The report that wasn’t meant to be read
When you spend time with the actual text of the Fedflix report, a strange thing happens. You start to wonder whether anyone involved expected it to be scrutinized at all.
Take Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The Fedflix report dedicates three full pages to discussing it as an example of Netflix serving as a vehicle for government propaganda. The problem is that Zero Dark Thirty has nothing to do with Netflix. The film was produced by Annapurna Pictures (which happens to be Megan Ellison’s company — yes, that’s Larry Ellison’s daughter), distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing, and financed independently. Netflix didn’t produce it, didn’t distribute it, and doesn’t have any exclusive streaming arrangement with it. It’s simply a movie that Netflix, like most major streaming platforms, licenses at various points for its library.
Including it in a 47-page document that purports to expose Netflix’s unique role in government propaganda is either the product of people who did no meaningful research or people who assumed no one would check.
The Stranger Things entry is worse. The report describes the show as being “centered on a character’s journey to coming out as gay.” That description would come as a surprise to anyone who has watched even a single episode of a show that is, by any reasonable assessment, a sci-fi horror series about teenagers fighting interdimensional monsters in 1980s Indiana. Will Byers’ sexuality is a very minor subplot that develops slowly across five seasons; it is not what the show is about.
The sloppiness is revealing. Either the authors didn’t watch the programs they classified, or they did and decided that the presence of a gay character at all, in any narrative role, was sufficient to categorize the entire series as LGBTQ content. Both possibilities point to the same conclusion: the classifications weren’t made to accurately describe Netflix’s catalog. They were made to produce a number that could be repeated in hearings.
The report also includes its own “AI-powered survey” of Netflix content, which it says shows the platform’s catalog skews 11:1 against Trump and 55:1 progressive overall. What AI tool was used? How was content classified? What criteria defined “progressive” versus “conservative”? How many titles were analyzed? On all of these questions, the report is silent. It’s a number produced from a black box and presented as fact.
The LGBTQ section of the report is where the ideological project becomes transparent. The section header itself describes LGBTQ+ content in children’s programming as “social engineering.” The report lumps together Cuties (a genuinely controversial French film about pre-teen dancers that was rated TV-MA, definitely not for children), Heartstopper (a sweet British teen romance), She-Ra (a cartoon where two characters share a kiss in the series finale), and The Baby-Sitters Club (which features a transgender character). The implicit framing treats any LGBTQ representation as morally equivalent to content that sexualizes children. This is the groomer narrative repackaged in think-tank formatting.
This is how the document functions overall. It’s designed to produce quotable claims and scary numbers that can move through a pipeline: report to press coverage to Senate hearing to congressional record. At each stage, the claims get further from their source material. By the time a senator says “almost half” of Netflix children’s shows contain LGBTQ content, no one in the hearing room is asking about methodology or classification schemes. The number has traveled far enough that it sounds like fact.
The people who wrote this report have to know it wouldn’t survive contact with basic scrutiny. Zero Dark Thirty is a famous, widely-covered film with extensive press archives documenting its production and distribution. Stranger Things is one of the most-watched series in streaming history. The factual claims the report makes about these properties are verifiable in minutes.
Which suggests the report was never meant to be fact-checked. It was meant to be cited.
And it serves two purposes at once. The culture-war framing — “wokest content in the history of the world," LGBTQ representation as "social engineering” — creates pressure for Netflix to move right, to make the kinds of concessions Sarandos was already making in that hearing room. But the report's actual recommendation, that federal agencies "scrutinize with extreme intensity" any Netflix acquisitions, is aimed squarely at the merger. The ideological attack is the public-facing rationale. The regulatory sabotage is the goal. If the deal collapses or Netflix capitulates on content, the people behind the report win either way.
The ratchet
The lesson from Facebook is that these concessions compound.
In 2016, after a Gizmodo article accused the platform of anti-conservative bias, Zuckerberg invited Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson to headquarters to assuage their concerns. It seemed like a small, diplomatic gesture. Within months, Facebook had fired its Trending Topics editorial team and turned the feature over to an algorithm, which promptly started promoting hoax stories. Internal proposals to crack down on misinformation were shelved because they disproportionately affected right-wing publishers. The Trending Topics incident, reported The New York Times, “paralyzed Facebook’s willingness to make any serious changes to its products that might compromise the perception of its objectivity.”
One concession led to another. Every capitulation taught the pressure campaign that the strategy worked, so the strategy intensified. By January 2025, Meta had ended fact-checking entirely, elevated Joel Kaplan to run global affairs, added Dana White to the board, dismantled its DEI programs, and relaxed content moderation rules targeting bigoted language. The transformation took nine years. Every step of the way, there was a plausible-sounding justification, a small compromise that seemed easier than fighting.
Duncan Watts, a University of Pennsylvania data scientist who studies social media, identified the dynamic back in 2020. “Facebook could end up responding in a way to accommodate the right, but the right will never be appeased,” he told NPR. “So it’s this constant pressure of ‘you have to give us more, you have to give us more.’”
That’s the ratchet. It only turns one way.
Sarandos’s hearing performance suggests Netflix leadership believes they can navigate this differently. Perhaps they genuinely think praising the president’s industry engagement is just basic diplomacy. Perhaps calling a six-year-old Twitter post a mistake feels like a negligible cost. And perhaps when the next demand comes, whatever it is, that will seem reasonable too, given everything they’ve already conceded.
The merger gives the administration leverage Facebook never provided. Trump’s DOJ can approve or deny the acquisition. Paramount’s hostile bid provides a ready alternative that would benefit the president’s allies. And thanks to the hearing, there’s now a congressional record of senators calling Netflix a “propaganda outlet.” That language can be invoked whenever the administration wants to justify applying pressure, or to explain why the merger needs “further review,” or to extract the next concession.
The irony is that Netflix isn't left-wing propaganda. This is the company that has made Dave Chappelle one of the highest-paid comedians in the world, defending his anti-trans specials against internal and external criticism. This is the company that won the bidding war to adapt JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, producing a prestige film about the life story of the man who is now Vice President. Netflix is a platform that hosts content across the political spectrum because that's what a streaming service with hundreds of millions of subscribers does. But the accusation was never meant to be accurate. It was meant to be useful.
What to watch for: board changes, political donations, content shifts, new advisory roles for conservative figures. If the Facebook timeline is instructive, these won’t arrive all at once. They’ll come gradually, each one rationalized as a reasonable accommodation, until one day a company that features Heartstopper and Disclosure and Pose has quietly stopped platforming shows like that altogether.
What “propaganda” means in practice
The language in the Fedflix report is deliberate.
The Fedflix report is part of a coordinated rhetorical project that treats the mere existence of LGBTQ people in media as an act of aggression against children. It’s not subtle about this. Section VI is titled “SOCIAL ENGINEERING: LGBTQ+/TRANS IDEOLOGY PUSHED IN CONTENT AIMED AT MINORS.” The framing is identical to what we saw in Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, in the harassment campaigns against drag performers, in the threats that caused Target to pull Pride displays from store entrances and move them to the back.
In 2023, Target had been selling Pride merchandise for a decade. Then came the coordinated backlash: viral posts making false claims about products being marketed to children, threats against employees at stores across the country. Target responded by removing merchandise, shifting displays away from high-traffic areas, and eventually announcing that its 2024 Pride collection would only appear in about half of its stores. The designers who had created that collection were left feeling, as one told the Bay Area Reporter, “angry and betrayed.” Target had asked them for their coming-out stories as part of the creative process. Then, when the pressure campaign arrived, the company folded.
This is what corporate capitulation looks like from the inside. A company invites LGBTQ people to participate in something meaningful, then abandons them when a sufficiently loud group decides their existence is controversial.
Netflix sits at a different scale, but the dynamic is the same. Netflix has 177 LGBTQ characters across its streaming service, according to GLAAD’s most recent count. That’s 48% of all LGBTQ characters on the eight major streaming platforms tracked. Heartstopper is concluding with a feature-length film in 2026. The platform has been, by any measure, one of the most significant venues for LGBTQ storytelling in the history of television.
The Fedflix report explicitly identifies this as a problem. So do the senators who read from Heritage Foundation talking points during the hearing.
The question is whether Netflix will respond the way Target did. The way Bud Light did after featuring trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a marketing campaign. These companies didn’t face antitrust review. They didn’t have a massive merger hanging in the balance. They capitulated under pressure that was purely reputational. Netflix faces all of that and more.
What happens if Netflix decides the merger is worth whatever concessions are required? The pattern from other companies suggests it won’t be announced. There won’t be a press release saying Netflix has decided to scale back LGBTQ content. It will happen the way it happened at Target: quietly, in the background, through decisions about which shows get greenlit and which don’t, which stories get told and which get shelved.
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GLAAD’s researchers have already flagged a troubling pattern: 41% of the LGBTQ characters counted in their most recent study won’t be returning, due to series cancellations, endings, or limited-series formats. Of the few transgender characters on streaming services, 61% appear on shows that have been canceled or are ending.
The infrastructure for representation is fragile. It took decades to build. It could erode much faster if the largest platform in the space decides it’s safer to retreat.
None of this is hypothetical. Companies facing less pressure than Netflix have already made the calculation that LGBTQ visibility isn’t worth the hassle. The people who wrote the Fedflix report know this. They’ve watched it work against Target, against Bud Light. They’re applying the same playbook, with higher stakes and more leverage.
Ted Sarandos told the Senate subcommittee that Netflix’s audience is roughly 40% conservative, 40% liberal, and 20% uncertain. He said it as though it were a defense. But conservatives have been watching Netflix content for years without Heritage Foundation reports being delivered to the White House. What changed isn’t the audience composition. What changed is that Netflix wants something from this administration, and the administration’s allies have made clear what the price might be.
Just once, when these clowns start to “woke” things, why can’t any of these people ask “what does woke mean, exactly?” Why are these people such cowards?