Netflix Denies Accusations of Shuffling 'Love, Death & Robots' Episodes According to Sexuality

Netflix is denying accusations that the streaming platform shuffled Love, Death & Robots episodes [...]

By Stephen Andrew

Netflix is denying accusations that the streaming platform shuffled Love, Death & Robots episodes according to viewers' sexuality.

Lukas Thoms, co-founder of Out in Tech — an LGBTQ+ tech advocate group — took to Twitter to allege that he noticed the episode orders for the new adult-animation sci-fi anthology series changes based on how users identify.

"Just discovered the most INSANE thing. The ORDER OF THE EPISODES for Netflix's new series Love Death & Robots changes based on whether Netflix thinks you're gay or straight," he tweeted.

Netflix soon responded, asserting that his observations was incorrect and explaining that they chose to try out something different with how they presented Love, Death & Robots.

"We've never had a show like Love, Death & Robots before so we're trying something completely new: presenting four different episode orders. The version you're shown has nothing to do with gender, ethnicity, or sexual identity — info we don't even have in the first place," the streaming service stated.

Back on his page, Thoms went more in depth as to why he believed that service was tailoring the episode list to based on the sexual orientation of the watcher.

"We've known for a while that Netflix personalized the marketing of their shows based on sexual orientation (trailers, cover images etc) but it's next level weird to change the actual experience of watching it. Thought I was losing my mind trying to talk to Andrew about the show," he said, also sharing a tweet in which he included screenshots.

Later, Thoms went back on his assessment, writing, "A final update: a friend I trust at Netflix looked into this, and apparently the episode ordering is just a 100% random A/B test that doesn't involve any ML. Identity-based recommendations are still a good discussion to have, in this case it was just random!"

Love, Death & Robots is currently streaming on Netflix.

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