Facebook — Fact Checks are just like our opinion man!
Facebook Makes a Shocking Admission About Its Fact Check Labels in Court Filing
…Now, Facebook is admitting what many of us have known to be true for some time: Its fact-check labels are opinions rather than definitive renderings of the facts. In court filings (embedded below) related to a defamation lawsuit by John Stossel, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, claimed that the platform did not defame the veteran journalist because they were merely offering an opinion when labeling his videos about climate change as “partly false.”
Meta insists that Stossel was not defamed because the fact-checks were written by a third-party organization. All Facebook did was affix labels to the videos based on… the articles written by the fact-checkers and the conclusions they reached. As such, the labels themselves merely “constitute protected opinion,” said Meta’s lawyers. [Emphasis added]
Essentially, Facebook is trying to divorce itself from the claims being made by the fact-checkers it relies on, in this, a French climate-alarmism operation called Climate Feedback (operating under the umbrella of Science Feedback), which Stossel said defamed him by attaching disparaging labels to his videos related to the climate change debate.
But according to Meta, “even if Stossel could attribute Climate Feedback’s separate webpages to Meta, the challenged statements on those pages are neither false nor defamatory.”
But Facebook “defamed Stossel, with malice,” the journalist’s attorneys wrote in the initial complaint. “First, they attributed to Stossel a claim he did not make, and which caused his viewers to shun him. Defendants made this false attribution recklessly, before they had even reviewed his video. And even after Stossel brought the issue to Defendants’ attention, Defendants refused to correct their speech, and intentionally left the false attribution online for anyone to see, where it remains today.”
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