As a self-described queer cinema connoisseur (a bit pretentious, I know), it makes sense that works like Boy Erased and Your Name Engraved Herein decorate the catered rows of my Netflix account. It’s common knowledge that most streaming services use personalization algorithms to serve up recommendations tailored to the individual user, so the number of same-sex couples seen on my account should come as no surprise. If you take a closer look, however, it quickly becomes clear that these queer-leaning recs don’t encompass the full story.

Consider the thumbnail image I’m shown for Heartbreak High, a very LGBTQ2S+-inclusive series. The image features Darren and Cash, who are a gay couple and, truth be told, my primary reason for watching both seasons of this high school drama. Yet, their appearance on my thumbnail is somewhat surprising, as the two are not really principal characters. The thumbnail seems to suggest something that isn’t true—that this queer relationship is more central to the show than it actually is.

Something similar is happening with my thumbnail for Stranger Things, which centres Will, another gay—but by no means main—character, alongside Mike, who more accurately fits the latter description. Sure, these characters are friends, but centring them side by side in a stylized thumbnail that could grace the cover of a 1950s gay pulp fiction novel feels misleading. The more closely I examine my account, the more I realize that most of its thumbnails are pairing characters who aren’t queer couples at all: Prince William and Prince Harry on my thumbnail for The Crown, Anthony and Benedict from Bridgerton—a lot of brothers, strangely enough.

Meanwhile, if you look at my real-life brothers’ Netflix accounts, you get a different story. Both of my brothers are straight, and their thumbnails for The Crown feature Elizabeth Debicki in the role of Diana. The Bridgerton series is advertised in one case with a one-shot of Penelope and in the other with a romantic embrace between Phoebe and the Duke. Even Heartbreak High’s thumbnail replaces my queer couple with the seemingly straight Amerie and Malakai (although—spoiler—their heteronormative relationship gets a little more interesting in Season 2). Looking at these examples, however, I started to suspect that my thumbnails weren’t so much evidence of a queer utopia as they were instances of pinkwashing—a strategy for corporations to appear supportive of LGBTQ2S+ people without any real investment. When I looked into it, I found I was far from the only one confused by these changes in thumbnail images.

Netflix is the first to admit that they tailor the thumbnail art used to preview each user’s recommendations. In fact, they’re quite pleased with the algorithms they’ve developed for this task. Tony Jebara—former director of Machine Learning at Netflix—elaborated on the platform’s personalized artwork during a 2019 talk. “If you look at any one person’s Netflix home page, it won’t look like your Netflix home page,” he says, “and that’s because we’re really trying to personalize with machine learning every aspect of it in order to get folks to continue to stream and watch and be engaged and then to renew at the end of the month.” You have to appreciate his transparency here; the end goal is greater user engagement. On the streaming platform’s official tech blog, Jebara and several colleagues add that customized thumbnails are Netflix’s “first instance of personalizing not just what we recommend but also how we recommend.”

Why the focus on artwork? Back in 2015, Netflix discovered that thumbnails had the greatest influence over whether or not a user would watch any given show. As viewers, we process images far more quickly than we do text. Jebara’s team took note, developing algorithms to create 12-20 unique thumbnails for each of the platform’s offerings before determining which user receives which image—a choice that largely depends on factors like the user’s past viewing experience and physical location. Despite Netflix’s insistence that no demographic data is being used to determine the thumbnail results, however, not everyone is convinced.

In 2018, Stacia Brown posed a question to her followers on X (then Twitter): “Other Black @netflix users: does your queue do this? Generate posters with the Black cast members on them to try to compel you to watch?” Brown went on to give examples of thumbnails centring Black characters who had relatively small roles in the shows and movies they were meant to represent, citing examples like Love Actually and Like Father as films with predominantly white casts that had Black actors featured in the thumbnails she was shown.

Editors at the pop culture magazine Den of Geeks conducted their own analysis, comparing the thumbnails each was shown for various series. They found plenty of differences, but their observations tended to focus more on their similarities than anything else. All of the participants loved true crime and a bit of gore, they wrote, with gritty thumbnails emphasizing this commonality. Yet, some of their most interesting discoveries were skimmed over rather quickly. “Half of our Heartstopper thumbnails feature both Nick Nelson (Kit Connor) and Charlie Spring (Joe Locke),” they wrote, “while the other half features only the latter. Why? Only the algorithm knows.” While perhaps it’s true that only the algorithm “knows,” might we conjecture a few guesses?

When looking at our respective accounts, my brothers and I weren’t surprised that their thumbnails for Heartstopper similarly displayed an image only of Nick, whereas mine was a two-shot of the characters looking lovingly at each other. Tales of the City offered a related instance. Whereas I found a romantic screengrab of Michael and Ben in bed; the algorithm gifted my brothers an image of the Barbary Street sign instead, an abstract offering with no characters in sight at all, queer or otherwise. If Netflix was pinkwashing my thumbnails, it appeared to be straightwashing theirs.

Netflix claims their thumbnail customization is about connecting the right users to the right content and not about tricking each user into believing something inaccurate about their offerings. A research paper from 2022, however, concluded that when considering the company’s economic imperatives, “the truth no doubt lies in the grey middle.” Returning to the company’s claims that they aren’t customizing thumbnails to specific demographics of users, it’s true that the platform doesn’t ask users for information regarding race, gender or ethnicity. Yet, there are plenty of ways to triangulate the data that they do collect. As the 2022 research paper observed, “These factors are reconstructed through the watch-history process, which can produce what is in effect a facsimile of these demographic insights.”

It should be noted that while Netflix alters thumbnails based on user preferences, there are plenty of other services (YouTube, for instance) who are following suit. To date, Netflix is merely the most transparent and seemingly successful with their algorithms. In many ways, this transparency is even refreshing.

I’m not mad that my Netflix thumbnails are a coterie of queer couples, nor that the result is almost something like a fanfiction repository where countless films and series are reframed to emphasize male-male pairings, but—like so many others who have found issue with these images—the concern is more about false advertising. After all, what might be better than a platform where queer representation seems to dominate viewing options is a platform where it really does.