In December 2025, Netflix officially announced its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, including HBO and HBO Max, in a deal considered one of the largest in the history of global entertainment streaming. This deal does not merely unify massive companies; it grants Netflix unprecedented control over global narrative content. Original works, even without full reproduction, can be reshaped through dialogue, translation, marketing, or event sequencing to suit a global audience, sometimes at the expense of cultural depth. Supporting characters can also be turned into spin-offs that reinterpret the original world, altering the audience’s understanding of events and characters. This control over storytelling is not just technical; it is a cultural and political power that determines who is heard, who is seen, and who is understood in global narratives. In the age of digital platforms, owning a story is no longer merely an artistic property, it is ownership of collective consciousness and authority over cultural representation.
Netflix is not merely a streaming platform; it is an intelligent entity that determines who controls the narrative and who is marginalised. The platform’s policies are not always transparent; there are so-called “hidden algorithms” that decide which works appear to users and which disappear into the shadows. This debate is not new. For example, shows such as Arrested Development, as well as smaller international series, disappeared suddenly despite high production quality, simply because they did not meet viewership targets. The same pattern appears in non-English works, where translation, dialogue, and sometimes plotlines are adjusted to be more acceptable to international audiences, which can alter the cultural essence of the work.
The platform also knows that strong global stories sell better, which is why it promotes works that align with global stereotypes, sometimes at the expense of authenticity. A practical example is that Korean series such as Squid Game achieved worldwide success, while works with deeper local cultural focus did not receive comparable marketing support. Netflix also controls broadcast timing, deciding when and where content is released, and uses viewership data to reshape future productions.
Spin-offs are sometimes produced to expand older worlds purely for commercial purposes, as seen in the expansion of the Stranger Things universe, or in turning secondary characters in Bridgerton into new series to attract targeted audiences. In all these moves, the platform is not merely selling content, it is selling the audience’s understanding of the world and its values. The real danger lies not only in what is shown, but in how it is presented, interpreted, and who has the right to that interpretation.
Thus, Netflix is not just an entertainment intermediary; it is a hidden force shaping global culture in subtle, intelligent ways, extending beyond entertainment into cultural and economic policy. Today, it serves as a model for any digital platform seeking dominance over storytelling.
Recently, the representation of non-Western women on global platforms has become a central issue in cultural debates. Asian and African works on Netflix have faced wide criticism, as women are sometimes portrayed in aggressive, shocking, or linguistically exaggerated ways that do not reflect local realities. This representation is no longer merely an artistic concern, it has become part of what is known as “platform feminism;” the crafting of feminism according to global market logic, where roles and images are rewritten to be globally acceptable at the expense of cultural and social depth.
In this context, the film Aṣḥāb Wa Lā A‘az resurfaced prominently, not only because it went viral on TikTok and X, but because it exemplifies this phenomenon. The film is an adaptation of the Italian work Gomorra, yet the Egyptian version ignored local cultural and social specificity, rendering the events and characters detached from Arab reality. The film portrayed Arab women, particularly Egyptian women, in a crude manner unrepresentative of social or cultural reality. Female characters were depicted as focused solely on sexual relationships or shallow emotional conflicts, using sharp, unconventional language and behaviour marked by exaggerated rudeness and aggression.
The debate over the film extended beyond ethics or artistic style to a larger question: who owns the right to represent the Arab world globally? Why are images of women reconfigured to suit the expectations of a global audience while local realities are neglected? Aṣḥāb Wa Lā A‘az has become a reference point whenever issues of cultural representation arise on digital platforms.
In this way, the film demonstrates how an artistic work can become a tool for re-engineering cultural images, reflecting the real danger of global control over storytelling. It is not just what the platform offers, but how it reshapes social reality to create a controllable, marketable image. The debate over the film is more than a local controversy; it is part of a broader global context raising questions about feminism, culture, and representation on digital platforms.
An even greater concern lies in the translation policies of global platforms such as Netflix and HBO, which do not simply transfer words but influence how conflicts are understood, who is seen, and what is erased. When works are translated into neutral language, whether Modern Standard Arabic or standard conversational English, subtle social and political nuances are marginalised. Conflicts become generalised, characters shift from living individuals into superficial models, and cultural and human dimensions are lost.
The official justification is always the same: “We aim to present content to a global, multicultural audience, so we use neutral language to facilitate understanding.” Yet the result is that complex conflicts are reduced to simple struggles, and cultural identity is erased in favour of a unified global narrative. In this process, social and political cues, local dialogue, and even the ways characters interact with their environment are often eliminated, leaving characters generic and culturally unrooted.
In short, neutral language becomes a tool of narrative control. It makes works digestible worldwide but neglects depth, creates a simplified version of reality, and marginalises the authentic voices of communities and the conflicts they experience. Here lies the real risk of platform translation: it is not merely about transferring dialogue, it is about reshaping stories and cultural identity under the guise of “serving a global audience”.
A clear example is the Korean series Squid Game, where many precise social and cultural expressions were deleted or simplified in English translation. Words such as hyung, used by younger characters to address older males and meaning “older brother”, carrying respect and relational nuance, were reduced to generic phrases such as “call me Sang-woo”. As a result, international viewers lost part of the depth of social relationships and cultural context, and Korean characters appeared to speak like Americans, stripped of cultural layers and subtle social cues.
This policy, while intended to make content accessible to a global, multicultural audience, becomes a tool for overlooking real conflicts and the social depth of characters, turning artistic works into a uniform global narrative detached from the specificity of their original cultures. The outcome is that audiences lose human depth and social relationships central to the work, while platforms consistently justify this as being “for audience convenience and quick comprehension”.
Let us be clear: this is not a conspiracy theory. However, the fact that a limited number of major platforms control global narrative rights inevitably promotes a single dominant culture worldwide, neglecting others and eroding the social depth that defines them. The global community is deprived of its true cultural diversity, precisely what gives the world its strength and richness. True power lies in diversity: in appreciating different cultures, learning from differences, and advancing humanity, not in flattening cultures into one.
Yet today, all of this seems reduced to purely commercial objectives, under the control of capital and investment power. Major platforms are no longer mere entertainment channels; they have become instruments for reshaping cultures globally, where one culture triumphs at the expense of others, marginalising local identities and denying them global presence. What is lost is not merely linguistic or artistic variation, but the ability to see the world as it truly is, in all its diversity and cultural-human richness.
Dr Marwa El-Shinawy – Academic and writer
