In a court filing responding to a lawsuit filed by John Stossel claiming that he was defamed by a “fact check” Facebook used to label a video by him as “misleading,” Meta’s attorneys assert that the “fact check” was an “opinion,” not an actual check of facts and declaration of facts. Under libel law, opinions are protected from liability for libel.
So-called fact checks have been used to ban people from social media and to destroy their livelihoods.
Should fact-checkers be liable for false statements that injure others?
Can social media, search engines, and others who censor content based on false fact checks be held liable for damages?
User have no inherent right to use someone else’s free platform. Facebook has no obligation to keep them on the platform and can remove them for any reason they want.
I’ll read more into this opinion… I have a feeling some important details are left out of your link.
Yes, Facebook is a private platform that exerts editorial control over content.
Its warnings claim that content is factually incorrect or misinformation, not just promoting an opinion that Facebook disagrees with. Warnings that FaceBook puts on content should logically be subject defamation laws.
Yes. Social media have exemptions from liability for what their users post, but they should be responsible for the contents of false warnings or false statements used to justify bans.
Plenty of people feel they have been unfairly banned from this site. Should the mods be required to justify their bans to the government or face legal consequences?
I always notice that people are more upset that Facebook might be mean to conservatives over real stuff that they did like help to engineer a genocide In Myanmar
Absolutely. I give credit to whomever thought up the term fact check. It creates the illusion of going down a list of statements and of identifying obvious “fact” or “not fact” situations that will be provable. In actuality it is cherry picking what “facts” to check and then writing an editorial on them.
I guess it would depend on the damages and if it can be proven. A lot of people use FB for their livelihood and/or for financial gain of some kind but I don’t know if that is the case with Stossel who used to be the darling of leftists until he stepped off the liberal plantation.
What I find astounding is the audacity of FB that they would assert their fact checking is actually just an opinion and admit that in a court filing! If nothing else they should get a smack down from the court to change the verbiage to opinion and not fact checking.
You just can’t make this stuff up, social media is begging to be broken up and/or regulated because all platforms take advantage of their freedom of speech while taking away others freedom of speech and it’s not all conservative content that gets caught up in the web of algorithm’s and cancel culture, it happens to libs too.
