Facebook ADMITS ‘Fact Checks’ Are Just Leftwing Opinions After Being Sued For Defamation

Is this a case of finally coming clean because they’re under oath in court? Or is this just a cynical case of moving the goalposts to avoid an adverse ruling?

For years, Facebook, from Zuckerberg on down, has solemnly assured us that they are acting as a platform, not a publisher exercising editorial decisions. This is an important distinction for the purposes of whether they are complying with Section 230 and therefore eligible for very lucrative legal protections.

John Stossel brought a case against Facebook after ‘fact checkers’ labeled two of his videos about climate change as false.

The objection to his videos did not lie in his denying of the problem itself (he did not), but in the fact that he was proposing solutions other than the alarmist Chicken-little-shut-down-the-fossil-fuel-industries-yesterday script that has been approved by our Silicon Valley overlords.

Since nothing he had said in those videos was, strictly speaking, false, he challenged the ruling which had supposedly been done by a 3rd party ‘fact-checker’. The ‘3rd party’ fact-checker was a group called ‘science feedback’.

Facebook offered a telling defense for slapping the ‘false’ label on his piece. You can’t sue us over that, it’s protected under the First Amendment as ‘opinion’. Whoops. You just admitted you’re a publisher, not a platform. Have fun with those consequences, Facebook.

Here is John, in his own words:

Wait — Facebook’s fact-checks are just “opinion”?! I thought fact-checks are statements of fact.

That’s how Facebook portrays them on its website: “Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution … We … apply a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article, disproving the claim.”

“Disproving.” Sure sounds like Facebook claims its labels are statements of fact.

…The company, which now calls itself Meta, also asked a judge to toss my lawsuit “because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects Meta from liability for material posted to the Facebook platform by third parties.”

But it was Facebook, not just a third party, that declared my posts “partly false.” Facebook’s warning was created by Facebook and posted in Facebook’s voice.

As Facebook’s own website says: “We … apply a warning label …”

I brought Facebook’s defamation to their attention a year ago, and they did nothing to correct it. —NYPost

John even went so far as to track down the company that issued the ‘fact-check’ about Stossel and spoke to them on camera. They had not actually watched his videos, despite putting in quotation marks around words he had never personally said.

Facebook throttled his traffic after a second video was similarly flagged. What was the problem this time? Were there factual errors? Nope. The problem with the video they had declared as ‘partly false’ was … its ‘tone’.

The New York Post ran a very telling story on who’s running (and bankrolling) these Fact-Checking organizations — which, at the end of the day, are little more than propaganda mills.

Stossel has a lot more to say about who else the ‘fact-checkers’ have been kicking around, and what’s really driving it if you have 8 minutes to spare:

But wait, there’s more!

The Back To Jerusalem ministry did a little digging into the funding of another of Facebook’s so-called fact-checkers. And they dug up financial ties to the CCP!

It turns out that Facebook’s “fact-checking” partner, Lead Stories, is actually partly funded by money funneled in from a Chinese company called ByteDance LLC. It is the same company that owns TikTok, and has been banned by the US government for use by government employees and also banned from India because it has been deemed a security risk.

… Just to be clear, ByteDance is in direct partnership with with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security for the ministry’s public relations efforts, which is the same department that has been launching attacks against Christians in China for decades and now they are funding Facebook’s fact checkers!

ByteDance is not in the entertainment business. It is in the news censoring business. ByteDance is in a joint venture with a Chinese state-run publisher in Beijing, a media firm in Shanghai, and runs Toutiao (China’s largest government censored news platform). —BTJ

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