NETFLIX ‘ARE CORPORATE TROLLS’
Royal insider says TV giant has helped feed hate against Charles and Camilla by broadcasting The Crown’s ‘inaccurate’ storylines
NETFLIX has been accused of trolling the Royal Family after a ‘sinister’ post on its official social media account prompted a wave of online hate.
Senior palace sources reacted with anger to the tweet, which invited viewers to watch a documentary on Princess Diana which they claimed would provide ‘ answers’ to criticism of i ts flagship drama The Crown.
It was accompanied by a video that paints Camilla in a particularly unedifying light.
The post has attracted a string of vile messages directed towards the British royal family, which are still online despite the Mail alerting Netflix to them more than 24 hours ago. Most of the comments are unprintable, targeted not just at
Charles and Camilla, but also the Queen and Prince Philip.
Critics have said The Crown’s account of the breakdown of Prince Charles’s marriage to Diana is ‘ distorted and at times downright inaccurate’.
A royal insider said: ‘It’s one thing to make a drama that not even the writer claims is entirely factual, but for Netflix to use its corporate social channels to create and post material that is one- sided at best feels like corporate trolling — i t’s pretty sinister.’
Now Conservative peer Lord Forsyth of Drumlean has accused the US streaming giant of ‘ crossing a line’.
He said would raise the issue in the House of Lords and with the British Prime Minister directly.
Yesterday he wrote to British broadcasting watchdog Ofcom complaining of the ‘ hurtful, false, misleading and poisonous impression of people in our public life who cannot fight back’. He called for Netflix to be regulated in the UK in line with other broadcasters.
Lord Forsyth said: ‘What they are doing is absolutely shocking. It is mendacious and it is untrue. And as every day goes by without any action on the issue, more and more people are seeing this programme, and unfortunately people believe this stuff to be fact.
‘If Netflix are also using a corporate account in that way [to deliberately publicise negative programmes about the British royal family] then the case for regulation is even stronger.’
‘Mendacious and untrue’
He added: ‘ They [Netflix] can’t continue to say, “This is drama, this is not our fault”. They are clearly using a programme which is sensationalist and mendacious to promote their commercial interests.
‘The royals do not have a right to reply. This is damaging, nasty and unpleasant stuff.’
Series four of The Crown, which covers Charles and Diana’s engagement, marriage and break-up, has been engulfed by controversy.
Critics fear, given the series previous reputation for historic research and attention to detail, that viewers are being misled into believing its fictionalised account of recent events are fact.
British government sources confirmed that Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has now written to Netflix to say The Crown should be clearly presented as a work of fiction.
But there are serious concerns – both in and out of the palace — that the show has already done irrevocable damage to the monarchy.
And Netflix has now used one of its Twitter accounts, NetflixFilm, to promote a documentary, Diana:
In another clip, Diana says: ‘He absolutely cut me dead ... it was hot and cold’
In Her Own Words, based on audio tapes she secretly made for biographer Andrew Morton. Its tweet stated: ‘The documentary answers much of what you’re asking.’
The post was accompanied by carefully edited real footage with a voiceover by the late princess, painting Camilla in a negative light. The account has more than half million followers and is also regularly promoted by the streaming platform’s main account, which has more than nine million fans on Twitter alone.
Netflix declined to comment when asked this week if it had a vendetta against the British royal family or whether it was appropriate for a corporate account to advertise its programmes in this way.