It wasn't controversial, but this is literally the textbook Manufacturing Consent model. The small number of people in positions of power at the network are either overtly aligned with the president that he just talked bad about, or want to stay or get on the president's good side. He doesn't even need to pick up the phone or post anything on social media, they know what they need to do.
To be fair to the executives. The main regulator that could essentially issue the corporate death penalty, the FCC chairman that can revoke their license to operate, literally said “we can do this the easy way or the hard way”. That’s a Dirty Harry or goodfellas quote. So much for “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the economy”.
Alternatively, perhaps it is the duty of the executives to defend their company, its viewers and employees, when confronted with unlawful and unreasonable government demands.
I totally agree with this but look at that statement. A company needs to fight the full force of the federal government, with an executive that has demonstrated no respect for the rule of law. That is insane. Every one needs to fight back but the federal government can stay wrong longer than you can stay solvent.
You really don't have to be fair to the executives. The FCC absolutely can't do shit about Jimmy Kimmel, and would lose the procedure if it ever came to it. Instead, they immediately bent the knee and decided that loyalty to the nascent fascist regime was more important that standing up against the most clear cut and unjustifiable attack to free speech in a long time.
'We find it's fine to waive the rule that limits large media company mergers in order to protect speech because this Nexstar merger will in no way impact speech in the US'. -The FCC in the coming months
Also because some people don't seem to know this, the government can't murder a man even if he was already dying of cancer.
I totally agreed with you. But mafia tactics work because they are terrifying. My point was this is unprecedented in American history and people are scared.
It's more that ABC/Disney is beholden to two right-leaning broadcasters who are colluding with threats to assist in their prohibited merger that will be approved now because they just gave the felon a successful hand job. There is no indication that the ABC execs are anything more than spineless, unprincipled cowards who cave in a light breeze.
I think most commenters are missing that a local broadcaster monopoly used their own freedom of association to drop the show
The FCC and Trump merely dogpiled on this
For Disney, they need to court the broadcaster monopoly as a key stakeholder to their revenue, this is all private sector and not a constitutional issue
But when Disney is getting kicked and then an expensive fight with the government looms while their revenue is already threatened and would be expensive to resolve with the government , they buckled
Thats the calculus here
but because they buckled, now their customers are using their own freedom of association to disassociate, hampering Disney’s revenue more from that angle
Unless everyone at the top has been fired, ABC and Disney are not remotely aligned with the president. A short while ago, they were boycotted by the right for their slanted debate hosting and woke children’s programming.
Those two could be entirely compatible if it turns out they never gave a hoot about the actual politics, and only did all that stuff because they thought it would get them more favor with viewers, and thereby more money.
I would personally not raise an eyebrow to learn this was the case.
I suspect they were looking for an excuse to axe and found one. It was all milquetoast, and that entire format of television is dead and the networks know they need to pivot somewhere.
The FCC chair threatening your broadcast license is a pretty good "excuse". There wasn't a public outcry, it was a government outcry along with threats along multiple lines of leverage.
Yep! And he wrote the whole chapter in Project 2025 outlining that he would do exactly this, in advance of taking the job. Who is going to stop him? The Supreme Court? Not likely.
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
It doesn't say anything about the FCC not pressuring Disney. They are not congress and are not making a law. I mean I don't agree with it but it's not clear it violates the actual text of the first amendment as written in the constitution. The spirit of it perhaps.
Where does the FCC's authority to do anything come from? Congressional laws. If the FCC is using the laws to abridge free speech it is clearly an unconstitutional action.
It's so weird to see sooooooo many people trying to make up reasons to justify clearly unconstitutional behavior, with extremely motivated reasoning, or perhaps motivated lack of reason. You cited exactly what you are saying doesn't exist! This is baffling behavior.
Not necessarily. Broadcasters have a license from the government to use the airwaves and they are obligated to act in the public interest. So some restrictions apply to them.
1. You can’t take someone’s property with out due process of law. There has been no showing that they violated that obligation. 2. The constitution has supremacy, so you can’t violate someone’s first amendment rights in service of FCC regulations.
In fact there is a more than credible argument that criticizing and mocking politicians is an essential public service.
That's not what the public interest requirement means. In fact, the FCC's own website says "the public interest is best served by permitting free expression of views."[0] And anyway, there are specific carve outs for late-night programming.
> Broadcasters have a license from the government to use the airwaves and they are obligated to act in the public interest. So some restrictions apply to them.
Necessarily.
Carr threatened to revoke licenses based on the political speech of ABC. That's clearly unconstitutional. Trump followed up by saying licenses should be revoked for criticism of himself. Unitary President cuts both ways.
If this is okay, the next Democrat who's President needs to shut down Fox News and their ilk or be impeached. (From the perspective of fomenting rebellion and generally posing a threat to our republic, Jimmy Kimmel isn't even on the list.)
As it turns out the government can dictate how the broadcast frequencies are used, including dictate things about the content. The company could have switched to online only and continued the show. Heck, they should have called uncle sam's bluff maybe and see what happened.
They are not sending Jimmy to gulag or arresting him. Jimmy can still continue his show just maybe on his own youtube channel or his own online platform or something.
It’s actually a terrible excuse as the backlash is demonstrating. Even if they were about to axe the show all along it would have been a good idea to delay that to avoid the appearance they were caving to government pressure.
> It’s actually a terrible excuse as the backlash is demonstrating. Even if they were about to axe the show all along it would have been a good idea to delay that to avoid the appearance they were caving to government pressure.
But that meant having to defend making up stuff about a murder and comment on the crime even as the others are flying flags half staff. Quickly showing they caved to government's pressure was exactly the look they wanted.
And let's say fought back, who would that be for? They younger viewers are not sitting at home watching TV and cheering Jimmy on. Many don't even know who Jimmy is; they just learned this week because it's on social media. So putting some kind of a defense and turning it into a battle rather than caving would have been the worse of the two choices they had.
I find it hard to take that threat seriously. There would be blood on the street - real blood - americans won't stand for it. (Some will of course but enough would not that the fcc would blink)
FCC chair literally said "We can do this the easy way or the hard way" the easy way being ABC cancelling it, the hard way being pulling the license.
And if you wait for the license to be pulled as your red line, you misunderstand how this works. This is an actual threat, the kind of thing that mobsters get RICO charges for. The threat has done its work and served the purposes of the administration. The crime has already taken place. The mobster says "but he agreed to pay the protection money and nobody ever actually broke his kneecaps"
"These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel,” said Carr, a Trump appointee, “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Anyone can say anything. Follow through and abc can just ignore the order and tell everyone watching what is happening. They have the power of the pen and will get people running to their congressman.
Based on everything that has gone one that seems to me at least very naive. There was practically a textbook length document outlining what the administrstion planned to do if they got in power and they are going step by step through it.
The president said there are 4 comedians (who make fun of him) that he wants to get off the air. After this event he posted something along the lines of "2 down, 2 to go." Followed by "Why don't you just force the other two out now?".
There was nothing wrong about what was said - they just already have a plan and pick any small item to claim is the cause.
For example they want to defund left leaning non profits and think tanks. They don't have a reason to. But now they are trying to claim they motivated the Kirk killing - not because they think it did, but because it's what is already their plan.
People still thinking they are being objectives or that there are "norms" left, in my opinion haven't been paying attention.
I don't believe you yet that Americans won't stand for it. There have been so many red lines crossed that most Americans don't even know what's going on.
He was last averaging 129K viewers per episode in the 18-49 demographic, I'd say that is a far better "excuse" than a threat from the FCC. As if DIS doesn't have a legion of attorneys. Give me a break.
I really don’t understand this argument that he wasn’t popular as if that’s at all relevant. Aside from the cost of putting the legion of attorneys protecting a show that’s not bringing enough revenue and the fact, there’s a broader risk with the Nexstar merger that requires explicit government approval that the FCC also threatened.
More importantly, his viewership didn’t suddenly change and the cancellation came about pretty clearly as a result of the FCC threat and not any business decision the company would have made otherwise. Not a lawyer but I would think that Kimmel has a 1a lawsuit he could bring against DIS and the government.
It was a very obvious dig at the president. There's still not good justification for the government to step in, but claiming it's "milquetoast" is baffling.
Digs directed at the President or the administration are and always have been well within the Overton window in American journalism, and previous Presidents and administrations have just seen them as a fact of life and brushed them off.
Thus “milquetoast”: an implication that any reaction to this is, objectively, an overreaction.
That the current President is a habitual over-reactor does not change that fact. It just means that you can paradoxically be taking a heterodox / outré stance by saying objectively milquetoast things.
Have you ever seen a late night show? Monologue jokes about the sitting president practically define the format. Every other president going back decades would just man up and take it.
I guess it depends on the sort of media you consume. I’ve seen Destiny saying conservatives need to be afraid of getting shot, and it seems like he’s still alive.
The other people who lost jobs seemed to have said much more direct and offensive remarks than Kimmel as well.
The owner of the Sinclair Broadcasting group (the company that owns the ABC stations that started this) is a far-right ideologue that has been trying to drag ABC into News Nation territory for the past decade or so.
Nothing Kimmel said was controversial. It was just being used as a false flag to justify other things.
Honestly, I thought it was way more tame than I'd expect for comedy these days, but it's also been a long time since I watched a late night talk show and traditionally the ones on the old networks tended to have much more mild and lighthearted comedy compared to the more biting/edgy stuff you'd get on cable.
Honestly I think most of the actually angry people only heard "about it". It was a very mild commentary.
The commentary about what Kimmel said was disconnected from what he said, hell the demand he give money seemed more like a criminal shakedown.
I think Trump's statement about going after anyone who has anything negative to say about them, that's the real goal / point. Doesn't even have anything to do with Kirk.
So when a talk show host vaguely on the left implies something that might not be true it is ground enough to disregard the fucking first amendment and use the power of the state to censor him. But when the entire GOP, including the president, all fabricate obvious lies about the shooter being successively trans, then antifa and then a radical leftist, it's fine. The double standards are fucking crazy.
You don't exactly need to be MAGA to think that Kimmel's remarks were incorrect. From the economist:
>After the assassination Jimmy Kimmel, a comedian on abc, suggested erroneously that Kirk had been killed by a maga fan. Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcasters, threatened consequences: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Within hours abc took Mr Kimmel off the air indefinitely. Mr Carr then said all broadcasters should ease up on the “progressive foie gras”.
The subject of the sentence was "the MAGA gang" - and it's true that they (and the president himself) were the ones desperately declaring right after the assassination before we had any information that shooter was a radical leftist. So for me it's a fair statement and really only disinformation if you purposely distort the sentence.
The second part of what he said is also a true statement, that they're using this tragic event to score political points and go after their political opponents.
Well, the kid did turn out to have ties to a radical leftist organization. He spent an awful lot of time on Antifa discord servers and, according to his acquaintances and friends, had frequent arguments with his conservative parents over politics. You think they were arguing about who voted Republican harder?
You're ignoring the part of the quote where he implied the killer was MAGA or MAGA affiliated. For reference the full quote is:
>The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it
Kimmel didn't explicitly make the accusation that the killer was MAGA, but the use of the wording "desperately trying to imply ... as anything other than one of them" definitely gives that impression. I mean, why else would they be "desperately" trying to? If an attempt was made on Bernie or AOC I wouldn't characterize leftists prematurely blaming it on the right as "desperately". It's just the most logical inference. The "killer was right wing" narrative was also being pushed in some left leaning circles, so it's not exactly outlandish either.
>You're ignoring the part of the quote where he implied the killer was MAGA or MAGA affiliated. For reference the full quote is:
He did not. But even if he did, so what?
Does either interpretation make his comment somehow illegal and deserving of government threats to retaliate against folks unless Kimmel was punished?
That's not a rhetorical question.
IMNSHO, you're focusing on the wrong thing here. What difference does it make what legal speech was used? The problem is that the government is trying to silence the critics of those currently in power. And at least in the US, the government isn't allowed to do that -- whether they're critics of the current administration or not.
If you don't decry that, it could be you and yours next. You've been warned.
Did you miss the second part of my comment? Even if Kimmel was in the wrong he shouldn't be taken off the air. I'm just pointing out why Trump might be upset. It's a reason, not necessarily a good reason.
>Let’s just say that the alleged shooter’s political philosophies are likely complex and are yet to be fully understood
By most accounts it's safe to say he's left leaning. You don't have to be a card carrying DSA member or have your ideology fully align with the Democrats platform to earn that label.
ummm First amendment? Its not the first time misinformation has been broadcasted on air, why does the FCC need to get involved in this one. Would they have gotten involved if the implication was that he was a liberal?
I don't see the FCC cancelling news shows on which Trump lies. Double standards driven by politics and why the govt orgs need career staff and not political players. Rule of Law anyone?
Not so much offensive, as utterly puzzling given the information we had on him by Monday night.
Not a fan of Trump or Jimmy, and I don’t think this is a proportional or good response. I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air. I also don’t understand why he left that little dig in his monologue.
Which information? The completely unverified stuff based on "a reconstruction" or "aggressive interview posture" from the same FBI led by the guy currently contradicting himself and telling lies in front of Congress?
This Administration was basically founded on making strident claims on TV which turned out to be lies they couldn't back up in a court of law.
> I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air.
Have you not been paying attention to where rhetoric in this country has gone in the past 8 months? The first amendment is dead, the great leader is publically calling for his critics to lose their broadcast licenses, and the new SOP is for the government to squeeze the shit out of anyone who doesn't toe the line. (Which is an ever-shrinking group of people.)
Be it with SLAPP suits, or by holding merger approvals, or by just threatening witch-hunts.
This is what 48% of the electorate wanted, and, well, it's what they've delivered.
---
Meanwhile, in Fox land, Brian Kilmeade was publically calling for mass-murder of the mentally ill the other day. For some strange reason, neither Trump nor the FCC, nor all the people outraged about political violence are making a peep about that.
> I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air.
Very little was needed. The U.S. president had already ominously threatened Kimmel and other late night hosts the day after Colbert was canceled, weeks before the shooting.
I thought Kimmel was hilarious; but as they say, there’s no accounting for taste.
The most ridiculous thing about this is that the world doesn’t cleave neatly into “radical left lunatics” and the righteous real Americans. I still can’t tell what the murderer was. Whatever that was, he acted on his own impulses - ones that are not broadly celebrated, irrespective of claims to the contrary.
There's just absolutely no doubt that Tyler Robinson is a deranged leftist. He was not apolitical. None of the evidence contradicts the fact that he is a leftist. Much of the evidence contradicts the protrayal of him as a right-winger.
Kimmels show was expensive, Kimmel has baggage ( a history of racist comedy, including blackface ). This was a convenient opportunity to chop dead wood.
He said the guy who shot Charlie Kirk was MAGA, which isn’t true, according to the information that has come out from those actually working on the case in the various press conferences, and from the evidence that’s been made public.
It wasn’t meaningful to the joke he was looking to set up, it was just misinformation for misinformation’s sake. At least it came off that way.
Add to that high emotions from people coping with a murder, and there you have it.
He did not say that the kid was MAGA, or at least not exactly. Here’s all he said about it:
> We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
> In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this.
He then played a clip where a reporter asked Trump how he was doing. Trump said good and immediately started talking about his new ballroom.
What about any of that is misinformation? Given how they were certain the shooter was trans because he used arrows on the bullet - which were helldiver 2 codes - it did seem like people were trying to make it seem like the kid wasn’t MAGA.
Turns out the kid is neither, or both, and was just terminally online, which none of us want to admit is the real problem because we’re all also terminally online.
> with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them
Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
A lot of conclusions were jumped to early on by everyone. Things are more clear now, but still not 100%. From what I’ve seen so far he was a Trump supporter in his early teens, but did a full 180 in recent years, due to the influence on the internet, as you mentioned, and who knows what else.
If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
Why would someone have to "desperately try to characterize" someone as something that they clearly are? To me, that language is clearly indicating that it is somehow difficult to do. At that time, it was fairly apparent that he was not MAGA, at least not in any remotely common sense of the word.
The current president and vice president of the United States said on multiple media channels that an entire racial demographic of people in a city were eating cats and dogs, and those same people are concerned about the minutia of a late night comedian’s informational and semantic accuracy (who they also claim no one watches, which is probably itself mostly true).
Your god-president lies every single time he opens his mouth. Huge lies. The biggest lies. He also ridicules everyone he dislikes. With hurtful language. All the time.
He has never apologized for jack shit.
> Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.
No one is tuning into Jimmy Kimmell for "news", though I am quite sure that his show is more truthful on a daily basis than your Fox News & Newsmax liars.
> If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.
The joke is that Trump probably does not give a flying fuck about Kirk. He cares about himself. That's it. He pivoted right to bragging about his dumb fucking ballroom.
You’re making a lot of assumptions here. Nowhere do I claim any party affiliation. Someone asked a question about why what Jimmy said was controversial, and I did my best to answer why a person might be upset. Other people who may have said similar things aren’t really relevant and it just gets into a game of whataboutism.
It was a political assassination done by someone who vehemently disagreed with certain viewpoints. The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on. Kimmel's comments were grossly inaccurate and wildly irresponsible.
> The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on.
The only thing clear about the shooter's political positions, is that it'll be presented as whatever will be most convenient to the speaker. He held views that individually map across the spectrum, allowing anyone to point to something and assign him at an arbitrary location.
> Kimmel's comments were grossly inaccurate and wildly irresponsible.
Kimmel’s comments are about the behavior of the MAGA world, and they were true: the MAGA world was trying very hard to push the idea that the shooter was not one of them.
> The details about the shooter clearly indicate which end of the political spectrum he was on.
I'm sorry, which details? Why does his opinion about a handful of topics mean that we can infer his entire worldview? Why do we have to assume that his views mapped neatly onto one end of the US political spectrum or the other?
I think the problem no one on either side wants to admit is that these shooters rarely fall into either side. They’re mentally unstable people who are attracted to fringe crazy ideas, regardless of the political stripes.
Their behavior indicts all of us Americans.
But of course admitting that and doing something about it means working together, which is a much harder solution than pointing fingers at the other side and doing little else.
I'm sure it's an accident and not intentional! A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.
Big corporations are made of people, some who post here.
Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.
What is happening is that routes and systems that normally have little and predictable traffic now are getting exercised... a lot harder (the exact numbers are for management to explain). Most things are going to be very resilient to this, as it's not THAT much traffic: It's still a small fraction vs resubscriptions and logins, but not everything is. Since the unsubscribe flows are never going to be anyone's top priority, this things happen.
You don't have to believe me, but I tell you it's incompetence, not malice.
I appreciate this peek behind the curtain but don't share your cheer that humans being involved in the process somehow means it should get the benefit of the doubt when things like this happen.
In fact, the reverse is actually quite common. The big corporation part often removes too much of the humanity from people. Too many people are comfortable making incredibly callous decisions at work because, hey, it's not their fault, they're just one small cog in the human crushing machine, and we all know what happens to bad cogs...
As you acquire properties, it's almost never possible to rebuild the systems from scratch, and instead it's becomes layers upon layers of patches and quick fixes.
A fun one lately has been AT&T. We have streaming with DirecTV, and they of course share authentication with the parent AT&T. So whenever I try to login to AT&T's website to manage my wireless or fiber, it redirects and logs me into DirecTV, everytime. The only way I can manage my service is to use AT&T's mobile app.
Hulu had some major problems during the broadcast of the Oscars so I was surprised but not surprised to hear about the issues with this.
>Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.
Finance bros and execs love M&A because they can hire a consultant to do all the hard work and get a nice paycheck yet they really suck for the little people and those trying to keep the lights on. Good luck out there.
Maybe one day we'll figure out this anti-trust thing.
This way of thinking has excused a lot of evil/malicious actions. I think it's time we actually start shining our collective flashlights at things, especially big companies, when their own systems break in ways that benefit them.
It's possible but I think Hanlon's Razor is more likely. I saw this happen myself and the form submission was successful on the second attempt. I just don't think they had the capacity to handle this surge of traffic to this endpoint/service.
It can be a mixture of both. It's extremely easy to Cover Your Ass while intentionally dragging your feet when a bug works in your favor. The manager simply has to decide that other tasks are higher priority.
Why would any manager prioritize this when it's going to blow over in less than a day, as evidenced by other commentators saying the site is already back up?
Right. I mean, ideally, because regulations have sufficient teeth that the company's existence is jeopardized by having shady business practices. When "it's a bug" is no longer an excuse, they could have avoided such a risk by having customers buy punch cards rather than saving their credit cards, for instance.
The problem with "Hanlon's Razor" is that everything can be explained by incompetence by making suitable assumptions. It outright denies the possibility of malice and pretends as if malice is rare. Basically, a call to always give the benefit of the doubt to every person or participant's moral character without any analysis whatsoever of their track record.
Robert Hanlon himself doesn't seem to be notable in any area of rationalist or scientific philosophy. The most I could find about him online is that he allegedly wrote a joke book related to Murphy's laws. Over time, it appears this obscure statement from that book was appended with Razor and it gained respectability as some kind of a rationalist axiom. Nowhere is it explained why this Razor needs to be an axiom. It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities. Bayesian reasoning? Priors? What the hell are those? Just say "Hanlon's Razor" and nothing more needs to be said. Nothing needs to be examined.
The FS blog also cops out on this lazy shortcut by saying this:
> The default is to assume no malice and forgive everything. But if malice is confirmed, be ruthless.
No conditions. No examination of data. Just an absolute assumption of no malice. How can malice ever be confirmed in most cases? Malicious people don't explain all their deeds so we can "be ruthless."
We live in a probabilistic world but this Razor blindly says always assume the probability of malice is zero, until using some magical leap of reasoning that must not involve assuming any malice whatsoever anywhere in the chain of reasoning (because Hanlon's Razor!), this probability of malice magically jumps to one, after which we must "become ruthless." I find it all quite silly.
I agree. It seems to be an all too common example of both:
1. lack of nuance in thought (i.e. either assume good intentions or assume malice, not some probability of either, or a scale of malice)
2. the overwhelming prevalence of bad faith arguments, most commonly picking the worst possible argument feasibly with someone's words.
In this case instead of a possibility of it being a small act of opportunity (like mentioned above of just dragging feet) not premeditated, alternatives are never mentioned but instead just assumed folks are talking about some higher up conspiracy and on top of that that must be what these people are always doing.
Anyway thank you for your point it is an interesting read :)
It doesn’t say don’t think about malice as a possibility, it says that if you aren’t going to think about it, you should ignore malice as a possibility.
Yep, "Hanlon's Razor" is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. It sets up a false dichotomy between two characteristics, neither of which is usually sufficient to explain a bad action.
IMHO you're taking it a bit too literally and seriously; I suggest interpreting it more loosely, ie "err on the side of assuming incompetence [given incompetence is rampant] and not malice [which is much rarer]." As a rule of thumb, it's a good one.
That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions.
Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak. To quote CS Lewis, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
I recently heard on a podcast where one of the guests recounted what his father used to say about the employees making cash-handling mistakes in the small store he owned. It was something like, "if it was merely incompetence, you'd think half of the errors would be in my favor."
It probably is a glitch in this case, but it's hard not to see the dark patterns once you've learned about them.
If you short charge a customer they will demand correct change if you overpay a customer won't complain. In the cases of customers giving back extra money it becomes neutral.
His father's theory didn't take into account this.
Hanlon's Razor is for a situation where good faith can be assumed, or the benefit of the doubt given.
When the actors involved have shown themselves to be self-interested, bad-faith, or otherwise undeserving of the benefit of the doubt, it can be abandoned, and malice assumed where it has been clearly present before.
my first manager told my as i started my first oncall "we dont think anybody actually cares about this thing, so if it breaks, dont fix it too quickly, so we can see who notices"
I’m amazed at the prevalence of conspiracy theories on HN in recent years. Even for simple topics like a website crashing under load we get claims that it’s actually a deliberate conspiracy, even though the crashes have turned this from a quiet event into a social media and news phenomenon, likely accelerating the number of cancellations.
That's true, but it's seldom going to be the case that the account cancellation portion of the app is all on it's own. It's going to be built into the rest of the application, including the parts your happy customers are actually paying for. You're taking down a lot of the site.
And I don't know about others, but the one thing that's sure to make me cancel and never return is when a business tries to be a jerk about subscribers. I know one subscription service that when you try to cancel will instead ask you to pause. Except when you pause, the site will make the buttons to complete a sale begin disabled. Then 10 to 15 seconds later, the button enables. It only does this so that they can show you a request to resume your subscription. Nope. I immediately went and fully cancelled, and I haven't been back. I only intended to pause for a short time because I was unable to use the service at all for several weeks. Instead because they wanted to grasp onto every customer too tightly, and they lost me for good. They didn't respect me, so I don't want their product anymore.
That’s the trick with capacity planning around cancellation. You can always deprioritize it because any improvement increases the speed with which revenue decreases (not valuable to the business) and customer satisfaction with this flow generally doesn’t matter since you’re losing their business. The only negative risk factor is CC chargebacks which will cost you some money but at scale most people generally don’t deal with that hassle vs just trying to cancel a few times.
These protest boycotts never last very long. There are many large brand names that have been boycotted over the years and they are all still in business and mostly bigger than ever.
Boycotts are different from unsubscribing. You can boycott Chic-fil-a and then one day return, but cutting off monthly revenue streams all at once is a much different dynamic. It takes a lot to get those customers back, especially for a service that already reaches most Americans.
I cancelled on Wednesday night. We probably haven't watched anything on Disney+for two or three weeks; the value was getting lower over time (possibly because we've watched a lot of what we wanted to).
Had it not been for this event, I'd have probably just let the subscription hang around indefinitely (or until some big price increase caused me to reevaluate it), but as you note, it's going to be a struggle to get me back --- not because of the politics involved, but because the politics got me over the "eh, can't be bothered" hump to evaluate the value I was getting and it came up kinda marginal compared to when I first signed up.
Maybe. There are lots of people who subscribe to these streaming services for a month or a season and then cancel, and then sign up again later because there's a new show they want to watch.
Some people have been boycotting target for a while now, but people have also been boycotting walmart for longer. Both companies are still around and have billions (tens and hundreds of billions) in assets. Enough people will keep shopping there to keep them in business. If either company ever does die off it won't be because of a boycott. Even where boycotts have a measurable impact on their earnings it's not as if it matters. Do you think the CEO of either company would have to meaningfully change their lifestyle one bit if the company makes make a few billion less one year? They wouldn't feel it even if they never got another dime from their company again. They'd still be able to live out the rest of their lives without ever worrying about money. They have no reason to fear a boycott.
It doesn't stop me from avoiding shopping at them both, but I know they aren't losing any sleep over it and I don't expect they'll suddenly stop putting profit over everything else.
Targets CEO of 11 years is currently being forced out. Yeah, I’d say the shareholders are pissed when the stock is literally -40% on the year while other companies in this sector are doing the opposite. Their stock is one of the worst performing in the sp500 this year. Long term outlook is worse by the day.
The big conglomerates are more resistant to it. Even of one of their brands becomes damaged, they have 20 others. It's hard for people to even understand all the things they own.
It would be hard to keep a secret. Someone would leak it. When i worked a for a social network, we were accused of censorship during a presidential election campaign. People were sharing and posting a clip of text in support of a candidate. It triggered the spam system which categorized it as bot spam and deleted all the posts because all the posts were identical.
> A big corporation would never, ever do something like cause a delay so people cool off and don't bother actually canceling later.
They better be sure there are no disgruntled or unhappy employees and no layoffs coming up, otherwise that slack or email message will come out and it will just make things worse.
I remember the HP website crashing in 2011 when they cancelled the PalmOS device line and slashed the price of the HP Touchpad tablet from $500 to $99. I had to call their 1800 number and wait 45 minutes to place my order with a sales rep. I wonder if Disney+ even has a phone number alternative to cancel with now that call centers are considered cost centers.
ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair (cnn.com)
629 points by VikingCoder 2 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 1133 comments
Best thing for a copyright holder is if people pay for their stuff. Next best is if people consume it but don't pay for it, as that at least preserves their relevance. Worst is to be ignored and become irrelevant/forgotten.
I think they'd much prefer people not watch than see people enjoying the content without giving them money (often while seeding the shows to other people in the process).
If nobody watches the shows they can blame the content. If everyone clearly loves the content but refuses to give ABC/Disney/ESPN/FX their business it means the company is the problem (although that wont stop them from falling back on the lie that piracy is all about greedy people who just want everything for free)
Have you tried using a VPN? I installed the free ProtonVPN I got with protonmail and half the internet stops working. VPNs look like bots with high exit traffic so they are blocked. Plus countries are cracking down on exit nodes.
I actually have ProtonVPN works fine. But if that's problem for you:
1. You can use VPN only when you need to use it.
2. "split tunnening" You can configure VPN to be used only for some programs, like those you use torrenting programs.
3. You can build your own mini-PC/RasPi "TV box" with VPN, storage for programming, connected to television. I wonder if there is not already ready software package for that.
All The Simpsons episodes are on my YouTube TV DVR, along with a lot of the shows my kids like (although really what they care about is a couple channels on YouTube proper), so even before this I was wondering why I was paying for Disney+ at all.
I wonder how much money Disney is going to lose off the cancellations for all of Disney’s streaming. Let say it’s 10%, that’s $2.4b. Linear revenue which includes cable and broadcast is only $2.7b. So even if Trump pulls their broadcast license, they’ll lose more money from this boycott not including boycotts of their movies and theme parks.
It’s hard to imagine even 1% let alone 10%. Disney is too powerful a brand and when people get bored and move on to the next news cycle they will come back.
Target is still hurting from their DEI roll back. 4% drop in sales 20% drop in net income. That was more niche than an attack on our 1st amendment right.
The broadcast license is also strictly speaking only necessary for over the air stations, it does not apply to cable. Cable providers get ABC for cheap due to Section 111 compulsory licensing (short version: a cable provider can retransmit an OTA station for only a small royalty), but there's nothing stopping Disney from offering ABC to cable providers for a similar cost if their license is pulled.
So, the impact at the end of the day is just lost revenue from antenna users. Cable and satellite would be unaffected. That's got to be a relatively small number in the grand scheme of things.