Disney+ cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit

https://creators.yahoo.com/lifestyle/story/disney-cancellation-page-crashes-as-customers-rush-to-quit-after-kimmel-suspension-033512277.html

222•anderber•2h ago

Comments

leakycap•2h ago

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.

ethagnawl•2h ago

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.

AndyKelley•1h ago

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.

thierrydamiba•1h ago

Call it HN’s rule: Never attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to malice

Aurornis•1h ago

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.

arcticbull•1h ago

COVID years really messed some people up.

silverquiet•1h ago

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.

lovelearning•1h ago

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.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

https://fs.blog/mental-model-hanlons-razor/

Ferret7446•53m ago

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."

AppleBananaPie•49m ago

What is rare? How is this measured?

Why do incentives result in perceived malicious actions rather than just malicious actions or minor malicious actions?

On top of this no one has said corporations are filled with evil people.

tbrownaw•38m ago

That's why scapegoating and demonizing people is so bad, it's a way of telling folks that violence can make the world better instead of worse.

SantalBlush•36m ago

The "malice" part of the razor is bait. People typically act out of self-interest, not malice. That's why anyone who parrots Hanlon's Razor has already lost; they fell for the false dichotomy between malice and incompetence, when self-interest isn't even offered as an explanation.

Supermancho•14m ago

> 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.

This rationalization is cope. All US Corporations making "normal" decisions all the time isn't casually obvious. I would say that wherever there is an opportunity to exploit the customer, they usually do at different levels of sophistication. This may mistakenly seem like fair play to someone who thinks a good UI is a good trade for allocated advertisement space, when it's literally social engineering.

Corporations make decisions that more frequently benefit them at the cost of some customer resource. Pair that with decisions rarely being rolled back (without financial incentive), you get a least-fair optimization over time. This is not normal by any stretch, as people expect a somewhat fair value proposition. Corporations aren't geared for that.

chrisweekly•13m ago

Agreed that actual malice is relatively rare (at least, relative to incompetence!). But I feel your take on Hitler is questionable. The question of evil is a tricky one, but I don't think there's a good case to be made that he was only trying to do the right thing. He was completely insane. But leaving aside moral culpability or metaphysical notions of judgment, for any definition of "malice", he embodied it to an the absolute maximum degree.

AppleBananaPie•51m ago

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 :)

SantalBlush•42m ago

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.

chrisweekly•26m ago

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.

gruez•1h ago

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?

da_chicken•1h ago

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.

zitterbewegung•37m ago

You see this in video games. Game breaking bugs ? Next week. People can’t buy or use a skin(s) for a weapon? Less than 24 hr fix .

nerdponx•1h ago

I've often advocated for inverting Hanlon's razor whenever money is involved. The more money is at stake, the more likely it is in fact due to malice.

vlovich123•1h ago

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.

dawnerd•1h ago

Anyone that’s used any of Disneys sites know they break at random on a good day. Just look how many people complain about the DCL site having issues.

Terr_•1h ago

I considered that, but there's a very real risk that the bad-press of it crashing will have an even bigger financial effect.

SoftTalker•1h ago

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.

I believe Disney has been subjected to several.

boc•1h ago

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.

dgacmu•49m ago

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.

SoftTalker•42m ago

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.

kjkjadksj•37m ago

Look at Target’s yearly chart. Then look at Walmart’s to see where it should have been.

nitwit005•3m ago

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.

blindriver•1h ago

Load shedding

is_true•1h ago

I've used Disney+ and I think I never used the app without experiencing some kind of issue.

arduanika•1h ago

A good webpage should not crash upon mouse over.

thrill•1h ago

Bravo sir, bravo.

disney_ta_2025•57m ago

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.

leakycap•49m ago

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.

MonkeyIsNull•30m ago

“Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence”

leakycap•27m ago

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.

adrr•23m ago

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.

luxuryballs•2h ago

“we have yet to prioritize scaling out the cancellation service”

sudditer•2h ago

All 47 people who were still watching Kimmel?

macintux•1h ago

Or the millions who believe the government should not be leaning on networks to shut down their critics, and the networks should not be cooperating.

doganugurlu•13m ago

Yes.

No one is upset about the free speech assault.

Nothing to see here.

nabla9•2h ago

I hope people realize that paying for streaming is optional.

vpn is all you need to pay for.

pleasecloselid•1h ago

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.

gibspaulding•1h ago

As long as there’s a tpb mirror in the working half the point stands.

skatingaway•1h ago

The previous poster said their VPN doesn’t work. How exactly does “the point stand” with actual evidence that it doesn’t?

skinnymuch•1h ago

Because torrent sites aren’t going to be blocking vpns as much as other things probably

femto•1h ago

Better to just not view it.

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.

autoexec•1h ago

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)

soared•1h ago

What do you use with your vpn? Every since popcorn time stopped existing, I haven’t been able to find something with good ux

asdff•32m ago

Popcorn time still exists and works. Latest commit was two days ago. Torrent sites still exist too.

Aeolun•1h ago

What about what he said was so controversial? It seems entirely in line with everything else I’ve seen happen on these kinds of shows.

slumpt_•1h ago

It criticized the potus, and threat of his ire is enough to scare corporations in 2025. A fairly concerning development

c420•1h ago

To those that are interpreting his comments in a certain way, the implication that Robinson is maga is highly offensive and textbook "misinformation".

Edit: there's clearly several ways to interpret what he said. I'm not making any kind of argument here, just answering op's question.

rogerrogerr•1h ago

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.

Terr_•1h ago

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.

yibg•1h ago

Doesn't seem that outlandish given the president of the united states said it was a extreme left lunatic before this.

RickJWagner•1h ago

Kimmels show was expensive, Kimmel has baggage ( a history of racist comedy, including blackface ). This was a convenient opportunity to chop dead wood.

vkou•1h ago

> 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.

perihelions•17m ago

> "Meanwhile, in Fox land, Brian Kilmeade was publically calling for mass-murder of the mentally ill the other day."

For anyone who missed it,

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20... ("Fox News host apologizes for remarks about killing mentally ill homeless people")

> "Kilmeade added: “Or involuntary lethal injection or something — just kill ‘em.”"

> "A clip of Kilmeade’s remarks started to circulate widely on X on Saturday."

> "“I apologize for that extremely callous remark,” Kilmeade said during Sunday’s edition of the morning program. “I am obviously aware that not all mentally ill, homeless people act as the perpetrator did in North Carolina and that so many homeless people deserve our empathy and compassion.”"

> "Many online commentators pointed out that Kilmeade’s comments evoked the extermination of mentally ill and disabled people that was authorized by Adolf Hitler in 1939. The German chancellor’s euthanasia program killed more than 250,000 people ahead of the Holocaust."

kashunstva•1h ago

> 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.

defrost•1h ago

Of all the takes on his motivations I've seen the most on point comes from an Australian of Robinson's generation ..

Death by shitpost: Why modern media is so ill-equiped to diagnose Tyler Robinson

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/19/tyler-robinson-alleged-...

https://archive.md/Lil0U#selection-941.0-941.80

Watching the US media struggling to cleave this into either left OR right as if the world is binary is, as you noted, ridiculous.

bitlax•1h ago

I mean, definitely offensive. Intended to offend.

bitlax•33m ago

It's his shtick!

gruez•1h ago

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”.

https://archive.is/ze4pD

You can check the other articles in the same issue and see they're not exactly cheerleaders for the Trump administration.

That said, the FTC shouldn't be in the business of strongarming critics, even if they're wrong.

siliconc0w•1h ago

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.

gruez•1h ago

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.

siliconc0w•1h ago

I disagree - my read is that he is saying the MAGA gang was trying to exploit the tragedy and desperately point fingers, which I think is accurate.

kashunstva•1h ago

Now fact-check Fox News.

Let’s just say that the alleged shooter’s political philosophies are likely complex and are yet to be fully understood.

gruez•1h ago

>Now fact-check Fox News.

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.

robertjpayne•53m ago

You could also just say he was a unaffiliated lunatic who was sick of Kirk's rhetoric and hate speech and took it into his own hands.

tanduv•1h ago

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?

pitaj•1h ago

They asked what was controversial about what he said, not whether the FCC's actions were constitutional.

zoom6628•1h ago

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?

aisengard•1h ago

As opposed to the implication that Robinson is somehow a leftwing activist, confidently claimed by every GOP politician from coast to coast?

Also, even if it were, as you say, "misinformation", that is now somehow taboo on television? A sacred line none must dare cross?

djohnston•1h ago

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.

gruez•1h ago

>It was all milquetoast,

???

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.

djohnston•1h ago

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.

derefr•1h ago

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.

add-sub-mul-div•1h ago

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.

wvenable•1h ago

Except Nixon.

macintux•1h ago

For all his flaws, Nixon had a far thicker skin than Trump and infinitely more integrity.

cratermoon•20m ago

Nixon didn't have a thicker skin, he was just more patient and calculating in his revenge. Have we already forgotten his "enemies list"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon%27s_enemies_list

epistasis•1h ago

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.

OutOfHere•1h ago

> The FCC chair threatening your broadcast license

That's a clear violation of the First Amendment.

epistasis•1h ago

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.

SoftTalker•1h ago

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.

JumpCrisscross•55m ago

> 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.)

bluGill•1h ago

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)

epistasis•1h ago

The threat was taken seriously.

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.

Cheer2171•1h ago

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.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/jimmy-kimmel-liv...

bluGill•52m ago

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.

they blinked so we will never know.

epistasis•46m ago

Saying that they blinked seems to be an admission that it was a threat with impact, no?

What is there to blink about if it was not a threat?

If I walk up to someone with a gun and wave the gun around and demand they give me their money or I'll shoot them, it does not matter if I was "serious" or not about the threat. If I tell a jury that I wouldn't have actually ever have shot the person, and that they just decided to give me their money because they didn't really need it so much, I'm not sure any jury would agree, unless I was a hell of a salesman.

ethbr1•34m ago

> Anyone can say anything.

Not as the federal government, because it explicitly lacks the freedom of speech citizens are ensured by the Constitution.

And absent a first amendment claim, the best defense they can come up with would be 'We were joking.'

Which, given the well-cited history of coercion by this administration (both in verbalized plans and actions), would be a hard defense to make.

BoiledCabbage•50m ago

> I find it hard to take that threat seriously.

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.

infinite8s•40m ago

Would you have gone to the streets for it?

fakeBeerDrinker•1h ago

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.

genghisjahn•1h ago

He was last averaging 220K in 18-49 demographic. That beat out Colbert (barely) and trounced Fallon.

https://latenighter.com/news/ratings/late-night-tv-ratings-q...

fakeBeerDrinker•1h ago

Interesting, I got my P18-49 number for August at https://ustvdb.com/networks/abc/shows/jimmy-kimmel-live/. Whether 129K or 220K, still piss poor.

vlovich123•1h ago

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.

fakeBeerDrinker•54m ago

You don't understand an argument regarding popularity and audience capture of a TV personality? Sorry, I can't help you there.

epistasis•35m ago

If he was averaging suppoosedly bad numbers, why wasn't he fired before? Just a pure coincidence?

I'm not sure if you think people are extremely gullible, because one would have to be in order to buy that line.

If there's a threat going on, and an another excuse the threatened can blame, the threat is no less potent.

ummonk•55m ago

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.

1oooqooq•1h ago

having experience with a dictatorship first hand, all a censor does is veto milquetoast stuff.

autoexec•1h ago

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.

nerdponx•1h ago

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.

christophilus•1h ago

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.

kevin_thibedeau•39m ago

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.

option•1h ago

Nothing. But wannabe dictator got offended

mingus88•1h ago

This is their Horst Wessel moment. It doesn’t matter what actually happened, it’s just the minimal cover to do what they always planned on doing.

Don’t believe me? Trump literally announced his plans months ago to take down these talk show hosts who were so mean to him

Poor guy :(

al_borland•20m ago

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.

superultra•10m ago

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.

vharuck•1h ago

Cancellation page worked fine for me around 11:30 EST. And here I thought I'd be late to the cancelling wave.

itake•1h ago

EST or EDT?

ir77•1h ago

just cancelled my hulu/disney bundle and requested to delete my disney account which was processed immediately and was very easy to find.

deleting the hulu account took me effort, had to search for it and log into a special site and only a submit request to yet to be processed.

so actually props to disney for not being user hostile.

deeg•2m ago

I had to go through a number of "are you sure?!" pages but I was surprised at how easy it was

jeffhollon•1h ago

Can we cancel 2025?

adrr•1h ago

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.

stelliosk•1h ago

Even if you're not planning to cancel, if you cancel chances are you'll get an "offer" for the next few months.

rchaud•1h ago

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.

khy•56m ago

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.

keernan•34m ago

My daughter is cancelling a one week Disneyworld vacation for 4 (w+h+2children).

catlikesshrimp•24m ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45282482

Previous thread, with a better reference.

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