The Beatles: Get Back, a documentary series more than 50 years in the making, dropped on Disney Plus last month. With it came some discussion about streaming censorship, as viewers began to notice that the miniseries contained swearing beyond what’s usually allowed on the platform.
Entertainment companies censoring themselves is nothing new. There’s a long history of the American film industry setting limits on itself, largely to avoid the government stepping in to do it for them. The Hays Code was a self-imposed set of rules for what filmmakers could put onscreen roughly from the mid-1930s into the 60s, for instance. The industry eventually replaced it with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which to this day gives out ratings to films on a voluntary basis.