Disney+ cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit (creators.yahoo.com)

If only they had a little money to fight back with.

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.

FCC can decide to not let the $6.2 billion Nexstar acquisition go through. Kimmel is just part of the bribe

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.

Ok. “Yes, its scary and authoritarian because it worked.” I said the line guys, happy? Moving on

There is also a protest of Nexstar’s advertisers to get them to avoid Nexstar for cancelling Jimmy Kimmel on their local broadcasters to begin with

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.

That goes:

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

Americans are standing for it. There's a lot of "I'm a free speech absolutist, but..." coming out of the American right-wing right now.

Would you have gone to the streets for it?

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.

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...

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.

Except Nixon.

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That isn't the same and you know it. Kimmel made no direct comment about what the shooter was aligned with, only about what the right wing sphere was attempting to frame them as being. Anyone with a moderate grasp of English should be able to tell the difference.

> technically true but ambiguous

which has been the backbone of satirical and scathing social and political commentary in the western world for 50 years at least.

The Daily Show, The -s30e102- 2025-09-18 Maria Ressa episode with Jon Stewart's monologue and interview went another way, "rolling over" completely into total Trump submission followed by drawing direct comparisons to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte popularist seizing of control of government.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Ressa

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Duterte

Well, the subset of stations that pulled the show were the ones owned by a (right-wing) company, Nexstar, that has proposed a merger that is up for FCC review. It wasn’t fear of being punished for allowing a “falsehood” on the air, it was pursuit of favorable treatment from a political appointee.

Thanks for the info! I was being snarky but I actually did misunderstand. Good to know the facts.

It's 100% true that MAGA people were being very vocal all over social media trying to characterize him as not being a trump supporter. What part of that do you think was a lie?

he’s clearly commenting on how the “maga gang” is characterizing the murderer. There’s no statement directly about the murderer.

How is it false? It isn't making the claim that the shooter was MAGA, but commenting on the right wing influencer sphere's recurring habit of accusing mass shooters of being associated with any group other than themselves.

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> "anything other than one of them" can very easily be interpreted in two ways, one of them leading a person to believe that the adult (not a kid) was somehow "MAGA"

Anything can be interpreted in any way you want as long as you're arguing in bad faith

> at the very least, the situation as tense as it was (is?), Jimmy could have chosen to leave it alone for a bit - why say that MAGA is trying to "score political points" at this time? Why not consider that many people are genuinely grieving and upset?

lmao, no one, right wing influencers nor the government, is doing this.

> ABC fired his butt, not the FCC or anyone else. A sternly worded message from the FCC chairman doesn't make a company like DIS fire someone unless it is convenient for DIS. That's a fact.

It isn't "a fact". If a mob goon threatens action on an employer unless that employer punishes an employee, who the hell do you think is actually responsible?

Are you asserting that he followed left wing influencers or read left wing books or attended left wing classes or somehow got his indoctrination from left wing sources?

There isn’t any evidence of that - there is only evidence that he hated the right wing (and to the contrary there is obvious evidence he came from a right wing milieu - just take a look at his parents). Simply hating a side doesn’t mean you have been indoctrinated by the other side - just look at people who left fundamentalist religious sects.

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.

>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.

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

The former is (for some at least) interesting. The latter is actually consequential. I'm concerned about the latter.

The former, whether I agree or not, is about legal, protected political speech.

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.

After pressure from the federal government which is a clear violation of the Constitution of the United States.

It's his shtick!

> Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not?

No.

> It heavily implies that he is maga

No.

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).

That’s a lot of pearl clutching don’t you think

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.

> 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?

Which is known now, but was absolutely not known at the time. There was so, so much complete BS being spread during those 24-48 hours.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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