The Conservative Cave
Current Events => Politics => Topic started by: SVPete on December 13, 2021, 11:31:27 AM
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Facebook Makes a Shocking Admission About Its Fact Check Labels in Court Filing
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2021/12/13/shocker-facebook-admits-in-court-docs-that-its-fact-check-labels-are-opinions-n1541089 (https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2021/12/13/shocker-facebook-admits-in-court-docs-that-its-fact-check-labels-are-opinions-n1541089)
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.
"Unsurprising" would be more accurate than "Shocking".
Basically FB is trying to weasel away the plain fact claims of their "factchecking". BTW, if "Climate Feedback" is a FB-authorized (and even -paid) "factchecker", they are acting as FB's agent, and FB is on the hook for their agents' actions.
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I think what FB is overlooking is that it's not what they intend "fact-checking" to mean it is what that average reader believes it to mean in light of FB not defining the label.