John Raoux/AP Photo
Disney World has tens of thousands of employees, and each year delivers $700 million in tax revenues to Florida state and local governments.
“This session, we took action to ensure that ‘We the People’—real Floridians across the Sunshine State—are guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on May 24. “If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable.”
The speech was given at the signing of Florida Senate Bill 7072, a bill that aims to prevent major social media platforms from “deplatforming” (banning or otherwise censoring) users. The law has been criticized by internet freedom advocates such as Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who argued that the policy “is mostly performative, as it almost certainly will be found unconstitutional” under existing Supreme Court decisions.
Regardless of the law’s survival, DeSantis’s talk about the consistent enforcement of rules is undermined by the statutory language. Buried in the bill’s definition of a “social media platform,” a specific exception to the law was added: “The term does not include any information service, system, Internet search engine, or access software provider operated by a company that owns and operates a theme park or entertainment complex.”
Florida is the home of the world’s largest theme park, Walt Disney World, along with another global contender, Universal Studios Florida. This theme park carve-out was purposefully added to the bill through an amendment by Florida Sen. Ray Rodrigues (R). As the second-largest fundraiser in the Florida Senate during the 2020 cycle, Rodrigues was a recipient of $2,000 contributions from both Disney and Comcast, the respective owners of Walt Disney World and Universal Studios Florida.
Some Florida Republicans have argued that Sen. Rodrigues’s amendment was necessary: The bill’s definitions would otherwise have included Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+, thus barring the company from moderating the review sections on its family-oriented site. Thus, according to Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, the provision ensures Disney+ “isn’t caught up in this.”
The most obvious issue with this argument is that the legislature could have resolved the Disney+ issue by writing the bill to exclude streaming services. Instead, they chose to create an exclusion for theme park owners, a truly bizarre criterion for a social media law. In Orlando, home to Disney World, Democratic Rep. Anna V. Eskamani wasn’t buying it either. “I assume theme parks saw this culture war agenda impacting their social media platforms and wanted out so they got a carve out!” she tweeted. “So now, if any social media company wants to avoid the impacts of this ‘bill’ they can just buy a theme park!”
The legislature chose to create an exclusion for theme park owners, a truly bizarre criterion for a social media law.
As odd as the situation may seem, the theme park carve-out is far from the first time that the presence of Disney World has allowed the Walt Disney Company to operate above the law. Disney—a media monopoly with dangerous reach—has long used the park to flex its political muscles in Florida. This corporate influence over the state’s politics runs deep through the park’s past.
In 1965, the Walt Disney Company bought 27,000 acres of land spread out across two counties for use in building the new theme park. However, the company desired greater control over how it used the land than existing law would allow. So two years later, at Walt Disney’s personal request, the Florida state legislature created the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID) on the land, a private Disney-led government with primary control over infrastructure, utilities, licensing and permitting powers, and more. According to the RCID’s founding charter, its Board of Supervisors elections are open only to “landowners within the district.” Because Disney owns two-thirds of the district’s land, the company alone selects all five board members.
When someone visits Disney World, they exist within a one-company government. Disney gives itself the building permits for new construction, and issues its own liquor licenses for restaurants. The RCID charter even gives Disney the right to build a nuclear power plant without having to seek state or local permission. Though the RCID has never been evaluated by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that its ability to issue its own tax-free bonds was constitutional.
The district is a strong symbol of Walt Disney’s personal vision of private-sector utopianism. Disney World’s Epcot theme park was originally designed to be a planned community that would serve as a model city: “a showcase to the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise,” as Disney himself put it. In the 1990s, Disney brought this idea back to life in the form of Celebration, Florida, a town fully designed by the company itself. Though it has since sold off much of it, Disney still owns significant property in Celebration.
The RCID also contains two modern company towns: Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista. Residents of Bay Lake are personally selected by Disney to ensure that the town’s city council obeys the company line. Many are current or former employees, workers in a famously low-pay industry, and have to pay for their own mobile homes on top of a $75 monthly “lot rent” to Disney. It’s not only workers, though: In Lake Buena Vista, Disney runs Golden Oak, a luxury “private residential community.” But whether in a trailer park or a luxury cul-de-sac, none of these local citizens have voting rights on district matters.
Regardless of intention, Disney’s embrace of private governments “has redefined the boundaries between private and public space,” raising fundamental questions about political accountability. And like most privatization efforts, Disney’s corporate utopias have rarely lived up to their promises. Today, Disney’s former model city of Celebration is racially segregated and literally falling apart.
Disney can now purchase a social media platform, and find itself at an immediate competitive advantage over every other platform.
Disney World has tens of thousands of employees, and each year delivers $700 million in tax revenues to Florida state and local governments. As the RCID illustrates, this economic power has long allowed the company to exert significant political influence in the state. But Disney has also increased its political spending in Florida dramatically over the last decade. The Walt Disney Company went from spending $2.1 million on Florida’s elections in 2010, to $5.2 million in 2014, to a stunning $28.3 million in 2018, “one of the largest amounts a single entity has ever spent on state elections in Florida history.”
Though 2018 also saw continued growth in Disney’s contributions to political candidates, $20 million of its political spending that year went to opposing Amendment 3. The amendment (which passed with 71 percent of voters in favor) allowed for the creation of casinos in Florida, and thus the creation of new gambling resorts that will compete with Disney World for tourist spending. The company also spent $1 million supporting Amendment 2, a property tax cap that cut the theme park’s tax bill by $6 million in 2018; this amendment passed as well.
Even before their new gift from the state legislature, Disney and Comcast had already recognized their shared interests in Florida politics. The two theme park–owning companies have both worked to block reforms that would allow Orlando to raise more money from hotel taxes, leaving even conservatives frustrated with Mickey Mouse. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who was a Florida state legislator before his controversial career in Congress, commented: “There’s a saying in [Florida’s capital of] Tallahassee that your bill is dead if it has a rodent problem.”
The theme park carve-out to Florida’s deplatforming law opens even more opportunities for the company to profit. While Rep. Eskamani was concerned about social media companies buying theme parks to dodge the law, the reverse scenario is even more concerning. Disney, already owning a theme park, can now purchase a social media platform, and find itself at an immediate competitive advantage over every other platform. The same applies to Comcast: Though its footprint in the state is smaller, the telecom giant’s apparent political alliance with Disney has now granted it a free pass to create an unregulated social media platform.
As Disney has expanded its growing monopoly, it has already made moves suggesting an interest in social media. In 2015, the company bought Instafluence, a service looking to match advertisers with social media influencers. The next year, Disney even considered buying Twitter, but ultimately pulled out of the deal because of the “nastiness” on the platform, according to then-CEO Bob Iger. It appears their luck may now be changing. After all, in Florida, Disney is now one of the only companies legally allowed to create a social media platform that regulates “nastiness.”
This story has been updated.
