Netflix Made a Funny Joke on Twitter and Ended Up Reminding Everybody That They Can See Everything We Do

We live in the age of corporations as people, and nowhere is that more evident than on Twitter, where the accounts of companies and brands tweet out everything from holiday greetings to customer service mea culpas to the occasional weird joke that makes you think “Hey, that fast food chain and I would probably be great friends under the right circumstances.” But when you step back and think about it, it is deeply weird that corporate brands interact with us on Twitter like we’re all just people going through our week. Like, Bank of America should not be tweeting “Mondays, amirite?”

Last night, Netflix waded into the choppy waters of corporate brand tweeting, and in doing so, they accidentally reminded us all why we’re kind of scared of corporations in 2017. It started innocently enough, when some enterprising young social media intern (probably) noticed an interesting quirk in the customer streaming data and decided to poke a little fun at the Netflix user base:

A Christmas Prince is a Netflix original holiday-themed romantic comedy that our own Lea Palmieri called “cheesy, hopeful, a little bit ridiculous, and overall as warm and toasty as the fireplace you’re watching it next to.” Literally, who wouldn’t want to have that feeling for 18 days in a row. Also, if watching the same thing on Netflix for 18 days is worthy of Netflix’s scorn and ridicule, I better hope they don’t find out about me watching the same West Wing season 2 episode every night for the past three weeks because I always put it on as I’m falling asleep and never make it through to the part where Bartlet tells Toby he has M.S. (it’s the one where Bartlet tells Toby he has M.S.).

As a burn on A Christmas Prince fans, it’s a B-minus. But its unintended consequence was that people kept picking up on the fact that Netflix knows that there are 53 people who have watched A Christmas Prince every day for 18 days. Netflix probably knows their names and their addresses and their credit card numbers. They know what movies they watch and when they stop watching them and what they watch after that. In business terms, this has always been viewed as a positive, that Netflix has been able to corral all this user data into a magical algorithm that helps them know what we want to watch before we do.

But tweeting at us like we’re buddies who give each other shit for the things we like and then reminding us that they can see everything we do suddenly made Netflix seem a lot more sinister. The people took note:

The playful Netflix Twitter elf even tweeted back some sass at some of its responders. In the right circumstances, it might even seem cute.

Just remember they have your credit card numbers. And they know which movies you pause on to look at butts.

Where to stream A Christmas Prince