“Shockingly untrue …”, says Facebook director on these allegations about Netflix – Times of India

Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, has strongly denied the accusations that Facebook allowed Netflix to read DM of users on its platform. In a post on the social media website X, formerly Twitter, Stone wrote, “Shockingly untrue, Meta didn’t share people’s private messages with Netflix. The agreement allowed people to message their friends on Facebook about what they were watching on Netflix, directly from the Netflix app.Such agreements are commonplace in the industry.”

The rebuttal comes after Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk joined the issue and made multiple posts about the accusations against Facebook and Netflix.

What is the lawsuit about
A recent class action lawsuit claimed that an ad partnership between Facebook parent Meta and streaming giant Netflix was instrumental in the social media giant shutting down its streaming division.
According to a report by TechCrunch, court filings that emerged as part of the discovery process in the lawsuit over data privacy practices between a group of consumers and Meta have revealed that the company gave Netflix access to users’ private messages shared on its platforms.

The document alleges that Netflix and Facebook had a “special relationship”. To stop competing with Netflix (which is a major advertiser on Facebook), the social media platform even reduced spending on original programming for its Facebook Watch video service, the document noted.
It also added that Netflix had access to Meta’s “Inbox API” that offered the streamer “programmatic access to Facebook’s user’s private message inboxes.”
As per the document, Netflix had access to Facebook’s “Titan API,” which allowed it to integrate with Facebook’s messaging app. In exchange for the Inbox API access, Netflix also agreed to provide the social networking company with a “written report every two weeks” with information about the recommendations it sent and which of them were clicked by the recipient clicks. The document also claimed that Netflix agreed to keep its API agreement with Facebook confidential.
However, Meta has denied the allegations. In his post, Stone explained that Netflix did have programmatic access to the inboxes of Meta users, but did not use that access to read private messages.