Meta denies giving Netflix access to users’ private messages

Meta is denying that it gave Netflix access to users’ private messages.

The claim recently began circulating on X after X owner Elon Musk amplified multiple posts about the matter by replying “Wow” and “Yup.”

The claim references a court filing that emerged as part of the discovery process in a class-action lawsuit over data privacy practices between a group of consumers and Facebook’s parent, Meta.

The document alleges that Netflix and Facebook had a “special relationship” and that Facebook even cut spending on original programming for its Facebook Watch video service so as not to compete with Netflix, a large Facebook advertiser. It also says that Netflix had access to Meta’s “Inbox API” that offered the streamer “programmatic access to Facebook’s user’s private message inboxes.”

This is the part of the claim that Musk responded to in posts on X, leading to a chorus of angry replies about how Facebook user data was for sale, so to speak.

Meta, for its part, is denying the accuracy of the document’s claims.

Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, reposted the original X post on Tuesday with a statement disputing that Netflix had been given access to users’ private messages.

Schrage and CTO Andrew Bosworth.

To maintain Netflix’s advertising business, Zuckerberg himself emailed the head of Facebook Watch, Fidji Simo, in May 2018 to tell her that Watch’s budget for originals and sports was being cut by $750 million as the social network exited from competing directly with Netflix. Facebook had been building the Watch business for two years and had only introduced the Watch tab in the U.S. in August 2017.

Elsewhere in the filing, Meta details how it snooped on Snapchat traffic in secret, among other things.