Social media posts call for a boycott of Netflix after false claims circulated of a $7 million donation from the company to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Reed Hastings, the co-founder and executive chairman of Netflix made a contribution to Harris but the streaming service told AFP it did not gift money to the vice president’s election coffers.
“Netflix just donated $7 million to Kamala, BYE BYE Netflix! Cancel your subscription today,” said an August 2, 2024 Facebook post.
The claim also circulated on X, TikTok, Instagram and in Spanish after US President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and endorsed Harris.
Harris, who has been the target of disinformation as she launched her campaign, secured the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination for the November election in a matter of days.
She received more than $284 million in donations as of June 30, 2024, according to the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) data (archived here), but funds did not come from Netflix or its political action committee (PAC) FLIXPAC.
The FEC states on its website: “Campaigns are prohibited from accepting contributions from corporations” (archived here). However, corporations may establish political action committees, as Netflix did in 2012.
According to FEC data the corporation’s PAC has not raised or spent any money in the 2023-24 election cycle (archived here).
Individual donation
A keyword search does yield a July 2024 article from The Information reporting that Hastings — who is one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors and had called for Biden to step aside — personally donated $7 million to a PAC supporting Harris for President of the United States. Hastings said it was his biggest donation ever in support of a single candidate.
“This is a personal donation from Reed [Hastings] and has no connection to Netflix,” a Netflix spokesperson told AFP on August 1, 2024.
The spokesperson added that the platform did not make any donation to Harris.
Hastings’ money did not go directly to Harris’ campaign, but rather to a PAC
Andrew Mayersohn (archived here), a researcher at the nonprofit OpenSecrets, which tracks money used in politics and elections, said: “Contributions to presidential candidates are limited to $3,300 per election, or $6,600 to a candidate who has a primary and a general election.”
Individuals wishing to donate more, often contribute to PACs.
“Any time there is a report of a seven-figure contribution at the federal level, it is an outside spending group that can accept unlimited contributions,” he said.
Mayersohn said that since the contribution is recent, OpenSecrets does not yet have a record of the donation.
Other fact-checking organizations have reported that the money was given to a super PAC called Republican Accountability PAC.
Government regulation expert Anne Zald (archived here) said the language in the posts are erroneous because the Federal Election Campaign Act clearly “prohibits corporations and unions from making campaign contributions directly from their own revenue funds.”
According to Zald, the rule was approved in 1972 “in the midst of the Watergate scandal and the concerns it raised about campaign contributions, and has been amended many times in the years since through laws and Supreme Court decisions.”
AFP has fact-checked other claims about the 2024 election here.
