Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries have complained to Netflix that videos on the platform violate “social morality”. The streaming service often causes offense because its content more easily bypasses state censorship mechanisms.
Looking at the screen: Not all content that people in Saudi Arabia watch is socially acceptable.
“I fell in love with you,” says a young woman in “Jurassic World” and looks at her friend shyly. “I’ve wanted you to say that for so long,” she replies, hugging her neck and kissing her. This scene from the Netflix animated series was recently shown on Saudi TV – albeit with a filter that blurred the kiss. Netflix is an “official sponsor of homosexuality,” said a commentator on the show, which was dedicated to moral issues in the streaming service.
The reason for the show was a Letter from the Gulf Cooperation Council, in which Netflix had asked to remove content that violated the “social values” of the member states. A day later, Egypt also joined this demand. The Arab states are threatening Netflix with legal action if the service continues to distribute “objectionable content”. A ban was even considered on Saudi state television – an escalation in the fight against Western films and series.
Culture clash on social media
Netflix is particularly popular with the younger population in the Middle East. Analysts expect the number of subscribers to continue to rise. However, the content of the streaming service repeatedly leads to controversy: At the beginning of the year, parts of the population in Egypt were indignant about “Foreign Friends” – the first Netflix film to be produced specifically for an Arabic-speaking audience.
In one scene, the lingerie of a female protagonist flashes, it’s about premarital sex, secret affairs, and a man comes out as gay. A highly polarized public fought a culture war on Twitter and Instagram. Similar debates had previously been triggered by the Arabic Netflix series “Al-Rawabi School for Girls” and “Djinn”, both of which were filmed in Jordan.
Netflix restricts which of its content is available where. When the platform removed an episode of the “Patriot Act” program in Saudi Arabia in 2019, in which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was criticized for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, activists were outraged.
Despite such backtracking, Netflix has a special power: Because the content is only available online, it is easier to circumvent the mechanisms of state censorship that have long been in effect in cinema and television. That’s why many Arab film producers want to work with Netflix – the freedom of content and large budgets are attractive to them.
Fighting obscene Netflix scenes is of little use
Saudi Arabia has been relaxing social rules for several years, also to attract more foreign investors and tourists. But many topics that affect privacy remain taboo in conservative society. Substandard content will be fought in the name of public morality.
The Saudi doctor Nizar Bahbari experienced this last week. He said on TV that, according to a survey of 3,000 Saudi women, 92 percent of them had watched pornography at least once. That is significantly more than in previous years, and it shows that such videos are more easily accessible. The indignation followed promptly: a hashtag in Arabic, which translated means “Nizar Bahbari offends Saudi women”, trended on Twitter in Saudi Arabia.
Although pornography is banned in these states, statistics on pornography consumption rank Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Arab states high. A few years ago, an evaluation of Google queries in Muslim countries made headlines, according to which people there typed the term “sex” into the search field more often than in almost any other region of the world.
This may seem surprising at first, but religiosity and conservatism are also associated with increased consumption of pornography in other parts of the world. One study from the USA found that sexual content was googled significantly more in the more conservative states. So even if Netflix were to cut scenes like the kissing girls, it wouldn’t stop people in Arab countries from watching videos with intimate content.