Bad Bunny was the target of most of the 2,000 Super Bowl 60 complaints

Every year, thousands of Americans send angry emails to the Federal Communications Commission to complain about something they found objectionable during the Super Bowl halftime show. The big game at Levi’s Stadium, with Bad Bunny as the musical headliner, was certainly no different.

“Explicit language and nasty inappropriate twirking,” wrote one angry viewer from Wheeling, West Virginia. “Hope you all know that people do know more than one language. For Bad Bunny to get up there a single about women and his penis and other sexual innuendo in Spanish is absolutely disgusting. NFL should be ashamed of themselves.”

With these complaints comes an additional tradition: the FCC’s annual release of these messages, often courtesy of reporters who ask for them through public information requests. Many of the upset Americans whose words will appear in this article come from a link, and variations of it, first shared by sports reporter Matt Brown, who publishes the Extra Points newsletter.

Those who have spent any amount of time on social media leading up to, during and after Bad Bunny’s performance could probably guess what some of these complaints harped on. The basic ones ranged from the songs being in a language the viewer couldn’t understand to the sexual nature of the dancing and even the clothing, or perceived lack thereof, the dancers wore. Others complained about what the lyrics were about after they, or someone online, translated them into English from Spanish. A fair number of the complaints seemed generated by artificial intelligence, as they followed a stilted template. For those who wrote their angry emails themselves, the main sticking point was about the “vulgar” and “explicit” nature of some of the dance moves and song lyrics — each word was mentioned over 600 times — like one complainant from Los Angeles exemplified.

“The Super bowl 2026 broke a new low of indecency,” the email reads. “It shows two men grinding on each other, on another scene a man robbing his genitals, another scene portraying a woman’s rear being rubbed by a man’s genitals, all of it disgusting for a day family show.”

Another viewer from Apple Valley, Minnesota, went as far to say that “Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe failure’ pales in comparison” in terms of inappropriateness. One person in Bremerton, Washington, took a tally of the objectionable words, including “(6) F words, a reference to f**king chicks, a reference to the artists d*ck on fire, and doing coke and rolling blunts.” A Las Vegas resident even bemoaned that they had to “make all of my children go into the next room” during the show, calling it “the most disturbing thing I’ve witnessed on live TV in a long time.”

Since all of these messages were labeled by region, SFGATE tallied how many of them came from the Golden State itself. In total, 156 emails came from Californians, with a majority focusing on Bad Bunny; other residents complained about the lack of closed captioning during commercials and the airing of the “Scream 7” trailer. The Bay Area had limited representation among the complaints. Pleasanton in the East Bay led the region with four, but only one was from San Francisco, only one was from Milpitas, and none were from Santa Clara, where the Super Bowl took place. These emails also weren’t as viscerally angry as some of the complaints from other parts of the state.

“The halftime show on Sunday was rife with savagely pornographic lyrics,” wrote an angry Californian from Carmel Valley. “The fact that they were delivered in Spanish is irrelevant. Most Americans don’t understand Spanish, so millions looked up the lyrics online. Even if some were left out of the performance, almost no Americans knew. Instead, they read them. Kids read those indecent lyrics! … America tunes in because this is the best that network TV has to offer. NBC & the NFL broke that covenant and they must be held to account.”

But in searching for emails from California, SFGATE stumbled upon emails that simply mentioned the state out of anger, like one viewer from Post Falls, Idaho did.

“Bad Buny and GAGA are symptomatic of the issues I encountered when living in Santa Clara County as a homeowner at 684 Baron Place, Milpitas, California,” they wrote. “There is a militant extremist spanish influence present at the University of Santa Clara, a major jesuit university in the United States of America. It was prevalent when I attended for a short time in 1968.”

If you’d like to see the full scope of the complaints, you can look through the more than 2,000 emails the FCC published in five separate parts.