“Fact check” labels don’t mean anything is objectively a fact, court rules

Television host and journalist John Stossel sued Facebook (Meta) and lost, though his case did set a precedent for what constitutes a “fact check” with the court deciding that actual facts are not necessarily involved.

When a Facebook “fact-checking” service such as Science Feedback or Climate Feedback determines something to be “true” or “false,” the judge said, the only thing established is that Facebook deems such content as such.

Put another way, true objectivity is not necessarily established with a Facebook “fact check.” All that is happening is that Facebook is making “a subjective judgment about the accuracy and reliability of assertions made” using its own biased standards.

We all knew this, of course, but it is nice to see the justice system make this differentiation because the line between actual facts and Facebook “facts” is too often blurred by political leftists who use social media to push their agendas and control what is being said. (Related: FactCheck.org is another phony operation governed by lies and fraud.)

Social media “fact-checking” is just subjective marketing of certain ideas and agendas

The case originally set out to hold Facebook accountable for alleged defamation against Stossel’s videos, several of which were labeled as containing “missing context,” resulting in their being deliberately downranked by Facebook’s algorithms.

Stossel lost both revenue and followers because of this, prompting him to take action against the Silicon Valley giant for assuming the role of Ministry of Truth.

One of the videos was dubbed as “downplaying” climate change as the decisive factor and primary cause of California’s 2020 wildfires, which Facebook claims were caused by global warming.

Stossel’s view maintains that climate change merely played a role, but that bad policies are largely to blame – an assertion that upset Facebook’s “fact-checking” team, resulting in a downgrade.

In another video from April 2021, Stossel addressed the problem of environmental alarmism. Facebook dubbed this video as containing “partly false information,” resulting in another downgrade.

Stossel sued Facebook for falsely inferring that he made statements he never actually did, as well as accusing him of making false statements outright. The court disagreed, stating that Facebook’s “fact-checking program” has the right to do what it did to Stossel’s videos.

Facebook can claim it is establishing a “fact” with such labels, but this does not mean that it is establishing an actual real-life fact in the true sense of the word.

“Simply because the process by which content is assessed and a label applied is called a ‘fact-check’ does not mean that the assessment itself is an actionable statement of objective fact,” the court said.

Based on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), the court decided that Facebook can use the term “fact-checking” to describe what it is doing – even if no actual facts are involved – because it is a public forum, according to the law.

Facebook and its “fact checkers” petitioned to dismiss the case based on anti-SLAPP (Anti-Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) rules and the court agreed. But just remember: a “fact check” means absolutely nothing, according to the law, even if Facebook is allowed to continue doing it.

“Almost anything ‘fact check’ is almost unrelated to facts,” a commenter wrote.

“Two of my favorite are Wikipedia and RationalWiki which if looking at their post of any living person or current contested position will always absolutely support the main stream propaganda narrative and not even allow any other scientifically derived statements disagreeing with their propagandist positions.”

“This is censorship extraordinaire. Peer review is another example of censorship in action. Peer review is a club of ‘leaders’ existing to assure only those in the club can be heard or seen in articles and speaking all without the use of the scientific method in what is passed on by the peer review censoring groups.”

Social media tyranny is out of control. To keep up with the latest, visit Censorship.news.

Sources for this article include:

ReclaimTheNet.org

NaturalNews.com