John Stossel sues Facebook for allegedly defaming him with fact-check

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/john-stossel-sues-facebook-1235019248/

by temp8964 • 5 years ago

202 221 5 years ago

cwkoss4• 5 years ago

Seems good for society that Stossel will be taking this to court.

Relevant quotes from article: "According to Stossel’s complaint (read here), he published on Facebook a video titled “Government Fueled Fires,” where he took on “sensational media reporting about a so-called ‘climate apocalypse,’ and explored a scientific hypothesis … that while climate change undoubtedly contributes to forest fires, it was not the primary cause of the 2020 California fires.”"

"[On facebook] Further information told readers: “Claim — ‘forest fires are caused by poor management. Not by climate change.’ Verdict: misleading.”"

If Stossel never said "Not by climate change", and then Facebook falsely attributed that statement to him and rated it false, they certainly seem guilty of defamation.

lovich2• 5 years ago

I don’t see a material difference between claiming “not the primary cause” and “not caused by” when in a short summary

cwkoss4• 5 years ago

I don't think Facebook would have been credibly able to rate “not the primary cause” as false - that requires being able to quantify the individual contributions of each factor. To rate “not caused by” is false, they just need to argue it contributed to the slightest extent: it's a much lower bar.

christophilus• 5 years ago

One is possibly true and one is probably false. They're very different statements, and they are about the same length, so there's no excuse to use a misleading phrase simply for the sake of brevity.

KorematsuFredt2• 5 years ago

I have seen the video and it is pretty sensible and definitely helps the debate around the fire. Either ways what caused fires is far from settled, the fact that climate change has anything to do with it is also disputed "fact".

burkaman12• 5 years ago

I would recommend reading the fact check as well to get a full sense of what happened here.

https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/climate-change-fores...

https://climatefeedback.org/responding-to-stossel-tv-video-o...

beebmam2• 5 years ago

If Stossel never said "Not by climate change", and then Facebook falsely attributed that statement to him and rated it false, they certainly seem guilty of defamation.

This is strictly, legally false in the US. What you have described here does not satisfy the legal definition of defamation. It will get thrown out in court immediately.

Here are the qualifiers for speech to be considered defamation:

To prove prima facie defamation, a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.

and here's a relevant Supreme Court ruling that further restrains what can be considered defamation:

In The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), the Supreme Court held that for a publicly-known figure to succeed on a defamation claims, the public-figure plaintiff must show that the false, defaming statements was said with "actual malice." The Sullivan court stated that"actual malice" means that the defendant said the defamatory statement "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not."

Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation

xondono3• 5 years ago

This is strictly, legally false in the US.

GPs point is the only one that’s in question (covers your point 1), the rest should be straightforward to prove:

2- it appears on Facebook

3- they have appointed themselves as fact checkers and supposedly review the video. They have full access to it as does anyone.

4- the difference between this and other view counts on the platform should be enough.

pfraze• 5 years ago

It’s the demonstration of malice that will make this suit fail. You have to show evidence that the alleged defamer knew their statements are false. You might even need to prove intent. Unless they dig up a Facebook email saying “We know this isn’t true but let’s screw Stossel” it’s going to be a hard case to win.

burkaman12• 5 years ago

Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpLIBY9nReU

In includes phrases like: "If all you know is climate scientists then every weather event you blame on climate change. If not climate change, what is to blame? [...] Foolish policies."

"You could have had this amount of warming and not had these fires."

"Bad policies were the biggest cause of this year's fires, not the slightly warmer climate."

"While climate change is a problem, Schellenberger's new book explains it's not an apocalypse: natural disasters aren't getting worse, in fact they're getting better. [...] A small change in temperature is not the difference between normalcy and catastrophe."

To summarize: the video heavily implies throughout that the fires are not caused by climate change, and literally says so a couple times. Facebook did not falsely attribute that claim. They didn't fully summarize the entire video, but I don't think the fact check is intended to - it just pulls out one particular claim it wants to address.

Aside: this video wasn't that bad, and I don't know if it needed a fact check, but that's not what the lawsuit is about. It did acknowledge that climate change is real and happening. However, it exclusively talked about climate change as a warming phenomenon, which is not the main issue and is a misleading characterization of why climate change is bad. Warming causes many other issues which are much more harmful than just "a small change in temperature". The discussion about forest management was valid and important, it should just be happening at the same time as discussion about climate change.

Edit: Here's the original Facebook post where you can see the fact check: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1015712197.... I believe this is visible even if you don't have an account.

Here's the fact check: https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/climate-change-fores....

Here's the fact checkers response to the lawsuit: https://climatefeedback.org/responding-to-stossel-tv-video-o....

PKop• 5 years ago

Sounds like the discussion is nuanced. But this nuance is lost by Facebook slapping a label on his content as "misleading", which for all intents and purposes means "wrong". Sounds like defamation to me. Why is Facebook involved in adjudicating the nuance of unsolved public policy debates?

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

The discussion about forest management was valid and important, it should just be happening at the same time as discussion about climate change.

I disagree. From where I sit, if you want to have a discussion about forest management, you first have to address the "it's all climate change's fault" smokescreen. Otherwise everybody shrugs and says "climate change, what can you do" and nobody will talk about what you actually can do.

starik363• 5 years ago

fires are not caused by climate change

Maybe it's wrong to base the entire premise exclusively on climate change. I am pretty sure we had forest fires before the current age. For example, 1920s in California were particularly bad. Sierra Nevada forests were on fire and even made it all the way down to Oakland and Berkeley resulting in hundreds of homes being lost.

Facebook's fact checkers need to be a bit more educated and exercise greater finesse regarding these types of subjects.

hartator4• 5 years ago

In the video, it also says "climate change is real", "climate change has made things worse", and "CA warmed up by 3 deg in the last 50 years". And they blame the CA gov for stopping controlled fires in the last couple of years for no real reason that made this huge time bomb that we've experienced. There is nothing misleading in that.

cblconfederate18• 5 years ago

Our review was based on one specific formulation of a claim we saw frequently appearing amidst record-setting wildfires on the US West Coast: “Forest fires are caused by poor management. Not by climate change.” We relied on comments supplied by three scientists for a previous appearance of this exact claim by Michael Shellenberger—who was also the guest Stossel interviewed in his video. The scientists explained that this claim is misleading

They re definitely in defensive mode with regards to this. It's funny to see the liability being thrown around like a hot potato. Stossel says it's facebook's, FB says it's the fact-checker's, the fact checkers say it's the scientists'. Yeah something smells bad when such things happen

Possible he could sue facebook in countries that have stronger libel laws?

cwkoss4• 5 years ago

I'm not sure how someone could watch that video and think "not climate change" was the main takeaway vs "forest management was the more-primary factor, though climate change contributes"

The video talks about how climate change contributed and is getting worse, it just points out that there is a clear policy factor that are the main cause for these factors, and climate change is being used as a political scapegoat to justify policy inaction.

slowmovintarget• 5 years ago

In none of your quotes is Stossel saying climate change was not a cause.

All of your quotes support the assertion that Stossel was claiming they aren't the main cause.

It's as though language is failing as us as a culture when public discourse is impossible due to constant strawman fallacies. The claim quoted by the fact checkers is reworded to omit "main."

kevin_thibedeau• 5 years ago

His shtick is to express a contrarian viewpoint on anything and everything. It was mostly harmless 40 years ago. Now it feeds into right wing trolldom and he's notably cozied up to his new core audience. I wouldn't value anything he does these days.

fortuna862• 5 years ago

Being contrarian on climate change is just as bad as being a denier, both result in inaction and increase the consequences.

coding123• 5 years ago

"Misleading" seems to be the current politically motivated way to handle the fact checker's tie to either liberal or democratic politics. A fact check should be either true or false.

microtherion• 5 years ago

Seems good for society that Stossel will be taking this to court.

It's good for society that he's taking somebody to court with ample resources to defend themselves against this utterly frivolous lawsuit.

"Disagreeing with an easily triggered blowhard" is not actionable under US law. And, much as you might think it should be in this particular case, I suspect you would find that libel laws more favorable to plaintiffs (as they exist, e.g. in the UK) would often be used against people with whose political views you are sympathetic.

dimgl• 5 years ago

Stossel is far from an easily triggered blowhard.

hackcasual2• 5 years ago

If Stossel never said "Not by climate change"

    Masson v. New Yorker Magazine

Libel in the US requires more than just inaccuracy, it looks at the substantial truth. So "not by climate change" vs "not only by climate change" is irrelevant for establishing libel

hartator4• 5 years ago

I think the big red "Misleading" is the libel.

kenjackson• 5 years ago

That is simply not substantial enough to win a libel case. This is like someone saying "McDonald's hamburgers are the worst" and then someone else saying, "you said McDonald's hamburgers aren't good". You never said that -- in theory the worst burgers could still be good, but it's not an unreasonable take given no other additional context. The libel is simply not substantial enough.

lovich2• 5 years ago

I can’t find the video to check myself. The articles description of stossel’s claims seem to be exactly what the fact check said was claimed.

Is this article biased or is the suit that frivolous?

perceptronas• 5 years ago

I suspect its this video [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-xvc2o4ezk

yalogin• 5 years ago

Is this different from someone calling Stossel a fraud in the comments? The platform just added a comment on his post. The more interesting thing for me is to see if this has other ramifications if decided in favor of Stossel.

leereeves• 5 years ago

It's different because Facebook are shielded from liability for other people's comments that they publish, but not for their own comments.

jetrink• 5 years ago

An internet commenter is less likely to be successfully sued than Facebook, because it is easier to argue that Stossel suffered reputational damage from an incorrect statement by Facebook, compared to an unspecific insult from a random individual.

perihelions• 5 years ago

Opinion based on disclosed facts is protected speech [0]. Hard to be defamatory when the facts under dispute (the text of Stossel's post) are public.

[0] https://www.rcfp.org/two-courts-reaffirm-protections-opinion...

xondono3• 5 years ago

To use that defense, Facebook would have to label their fact checks as opinions, something that AFAIK they do not.

throw_m2393393• 5 years ago

To use that defense, Facebook would have to label their fact checks as opinions, something that AFAIK they do not.

Cause these "fact checks" ARE opinions and Facebook should start labelling their own "fact checks" as "Facebook opinion". The cowardice of that system as well... like Facebook can be an arbiter of truth at first place? They are trying to have their cake and eat it too, by still profiting from content they deem "falsehoods" while trying to get off the hook regarding mass media critical of Facebook.

djoldman2• 5 years ago

Libel is a method of defamation expressed by print, writing, pictures, signs, effigies, or any communication embodied in physical form that is injurious to a person's reputation, exposes a person to public hatred, contempt or ridicule, or injures a person in his/her business or profession. [0]

This is interesting as it seems that platforms like Twitter and Facebook have avoided liability through Section 230 for content posted on their websites as the platform did not create the content.

However, now that they seem to be automatically "fact-checking" and/or otherwise creating content with people as subjects, the platforms may be opening the door to liability.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/libel

wpasc• 5 years ago

Wow, this is a great point that I hadn't previously considered. These platforms can even conceivably get away with content removal more easily as ToS violations without stepping over the line to become publishers. But if one considers a fact-check as its own content, then that may become a defining point in a future ruling or examination of 230.

I imagine there's a great case to be made that fact checks are platform sponsored content (if a fact check is viewed as an analysis of the content along with verdict [ie. "Misleading"], easy to view that similarly to the plethora of analysis content [reviews, summaries, etc] populating all social media platforms). I'm fascinated to see how this will play out.

cronix• 5 years ago

But if one considers a fact-check as its own content, then that may become a defining point in a future ruling or examination of 230

I believe that is why they, and other platforms in a similar position, use 3rd party "fact checkers." To try to legally skirt that. "It's not our content/fact check, it's from this unbiased third party. Don't look at us." They seem to have borrowed "plausible deniability" from some 3 letter agencies since it legally works well for them.

To fight the spread of misinformation and provide people with more reliable information, Facebook partners with independent third-party fact-checkers that are certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). Since we do not believe that a private company like Facebook should be the arbiters of truth, we rely on fact-checkers to identify, review and rate potential misinformation across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Their work enables us to take action and reduce the spread of problematic content across our apps.

https://www.facebook.com/journalismproject/programs/third-pa...

ch4s33• 5 years ago

There is no platform/publisher distinction in the law. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 [1] was originally meant to be a carve out to allow websites to host comment sections without being considered the "speaker" of those comments and thereby being subjected to the speech restrictions in the rest of the law. The rest of the law has since been struck down.

When people are mad about 230, what they're really mad about is the 1st Amendment.

Is Facebook the speaker when it applies a fact check? Maybe but it doesn't matter much with respect to 230 offers minimal protection beyond the 1st Amendment. And as others have stated, the bar for libel against public figures is VERY high in the US.

[1]https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

burkaman12• 5 years ago

Facebook is careful about this. On the fact check in question, Facebook only says "Missing Context" and "Independent fact-checkers say this information is missing context and could mislead people." Only if you click through to the independent site do you see a specific claim labeled as misleading: https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/climate-change-fores...

cblconfederate18• 5 years ago

So he then proceeds to sue the fact-checkers. There is definitely liability here from which social media have been shielded so far

temp89644• 5 years ago

If Facebook paste “this information is missing context and could mislead people” under every single post/story, it would still stand true but it would be bad for the business.

hartator4• 5 years ago

Yes, it seems pretty obvious they are free to fact check if they want to but they also become responsible of all these new fact check contents they push.

vkou2• 5 years ago

Only if the fact checkers acted maliciously. Just like how when people say false things, they generally aren't held accountable for it. [1] Why are you so eager to hold fact checkers to a higher legal standard than the people they are responding to?

It would truly be a bizarre universe if saying things that are damaging to other people were permitted, but fact-checking those statements were not. Fortunately, we don't live in such a universe.

[1] If they were, most of our political class would be in prison.

lmilcin• 5 years ago

That is interesting.

So... basically we are waiting until they get their fact checking wrong against a wrong person?

This must happen eventually.

But you could argue that so many public persons openly lie and even declare that "they can lie to public since they are not under oath", that it is hard to punish a company that tries to do right by fact checking a lot of falsehoods. It is reasonable to assume that when you correct a million falsehoods you will make some mistakes.

thugthrasher• 5 years ago

To be clear, if it's a public figure, then just getting the fact checking wrong is not enough to be defamation. There has to be "actual malice" which BASICALLY just means they knew they were wrong or should have known they were wrong. If they can show that they were just following the information that was publicly available then they can make mistakes without losing a lawsuit.

ttyprintk• 5 years ago

Certain famous persons are expected to lie, so it wouldn’t injure their reputation in the way that (the above) defamation is defined. A politician, for example, might pursue such a case only for publicity.

cblconfederate18• 5 years ago

There are some infamous blog posts that will tell you that 230 protects websites no matter what happens. But when bad things happen and the law protects bad actors, then it's a bad law.

Nasrudith2• 5 years ago

Rights protect everyone - including bad actors. Any definition of a bad law that includes rights as such is euphemistically referred to as a "different understanding".

Does nobody remember Blackstone's Principles these dats in their zeal to collect scalps? A good law is one which does not punish innocents - that should be where the lines are always drawn.

danShumway8• 5 years ago

The current case doesn't really have anything to do with Section 230 that I can see. Section 230 protects Facebook from being sued for what other people post on their website. It doesn't impact content that they themselves create. If Facebook publishes an illegal blog post or attaches its own content... I mean, it would at least need to make a case that it wasn't making the fact check itself, that this was an API or something.

I'm not sure if they could pull that off or not. But in any case, Section 230 has never been a blanket law that says websites can't be sued for anything. It shields them from liability for 3rd-party content, that's it.

Realistically, the reason this lawsuit is probably going to fail is because it doesn't look like the fact check in question is actually defamation. I'm not a lawyer, maybe Stossel will surprise me. But my immediate take is that I think he has a weaker case than Owens', and her defamation claims got pretty solidly rejected, and not for any 230 reasons.

filmgirlcw5• 5 years ago

But 230 wouldn’t even come into this discussion because the standard of libel for Stossel, as a public figure, is significantly higher. He has to prove that Facebook/the fact checkers had actual malice in stating its claims. Meaning, the Facebook/fact checkers had to be intentionally lying or acting in reckless disregard for whether the statement was true or not.

It’s a more interesting situation if he wasn’t a public figure, but even then, I doubt Facebook would be the one deemed responsible for the so-called libel, it would come down to the fact checked. In fact, in the similar Candace Owens lawsuit (which the court threw out), she sued USA Today and the fact-checking company, not Facebook. And her claims were still thrown out, both because she couldn’t show there was actual malice involved or that the claims that her statement was “false” was untrue. That opinion is here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21068070-owens Owens is of course a public figure, but that wasn’t even a large part of the reason her lawsuit was thrown out on its face.

Stossel is getting press time by suing but he’s a public figure and suing Facebook because a fact checking service elicited an opinion/notation that didn’t have the nuance he wanted is laughable.

shkkmo2• 5 years ago

Stossel is getting press time by suing but he’s a public figure and suing Facebook because a fact checking service elicited an opinion/notation that didn’t have the nuance he wanted is laughable.

Really? From his filing it sounds like Stossel has explicit evidence that the fact checkers admitted that he didn't make any false claims and still refused to correct their speech.

We'll see if that counts as "deliberate malice" or no, but it does seem to be a case with much stronger claims than Owens'

cblconfederate18• 5 years ago

he s a journalist, like the fact-checkers, no? how does 'public figure' work? So, it's like a barber libeling another barber?

(btw it's ridiculous to call them 'fact-checkers' -- all journalists are factcheckers, some are good some bad)

JPKab• 5 years ago

The fact checking services are wrong, a LOT. They are not ideologically neutral, particularly the ones used by Facebook.

For a specific example of the abusive and censorious nature of this business model, see Glenn Greenwald's recent article on the subject, specifically in regards to the blanket denunciation of the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation. Greenwald isn't a right-wing hack, and in fact he is aggressively pro-Palestinian, anti-war, and has been a loud critic of Bolsonaro despite being a resident of Brazil.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/new-proof-emerges-of-the-bi...

Edit:

Yes, a parade of downvotes without any refutations. Pay no attention to the fact that the guy in charge of censoring and fact checking operations at Facebook is a lifelong Democratic Party operative who literally worked for the Democratic House Majority PAC, and before that Senator Barbara Boxer, before going to work for Facebook.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-stone-7575b34a

tschwimmer• 5 years ago

I feel like the malice standard makes libel essentially impossible to prove in the US. Are there any cases where malice has been proven? I imagine they would have had to look at private conversations by the accused indicated that they really didn't like alleged victim or something.

Aerroon• 5 years ago

While this might not work in the US, it might work elsewhere. Other countries have legal protections for platforms from their users too, but that usually have lower standards for proving defamation of public figures than the US.

willis936• 5 years ago

acting in reckless disregard

Negligence is a motive. Considering the influence facebook has a compelling argument could be made on the chilling effects of a "sleepy code writer".

baryphonic3• 5 years ago

Stossel is getting press time by suing but he’s a public figure and suing Facebook because a fact checking service elicited an opinion/notation that didn’t have the nuance he wanted is laughable.

If the facts alleged in Stossel's initial filing are true, they are fairly damning against the defendants[0]. The Candace Owens initial complaint, by contrast, is kind of a mess [1].

Re: Owens: One of her claims was that a manager at one of the defendant companies had once held a prominent position at CNN, and CNN has an obvious Democrat bias. Even if all of those things were true, the suit doesn't allege any sort of causal connection, not even "upon information or belief," between that claim and her being demonetized or otherwise sanctioned by Facebook. Her complaint was 50 pages long with 50 pages of exhibits, and yet a lot of it was used just to make political grandstanding statements. It just reads like a poorly-drafted lawsuit meant to generate publicity insofar as it exceeds a lawyer's duty not to file frivolous nonsense. For what it's worth, the judge also seems to kind of give Owens short shrift by asserting in his judgment that no reasonable person would conclude the words "hoax alert" and "false" attached to Owens' post imply that Owens was intentionally lying. (This was backed by case law involving claims of "blackmail" to be judged more hyperbolic and rhetorical than alleging the commission of a crime. The two cases seem pretty different. Thin gruel, IMO.) Regardless, I can't help but think that Owens really did fail to state a claim.

Stossel's claims are much tighter. He published two videos on Facebook, and both were "fact checked" by one particular organization.

In the first video, Stossel claims that climate change, forestry management and other practices are each partly responsible for the 2020 CA wildfires to varying degrees. Per the complaint, the defendants then attached a "fact check" claiming that Stossel did not mention the effects of climate change on the fires. Stossel made efforts to contact the fact checking organization and interviewed two of the three employees who were listed as reviewers for his video. Neither of them had even seen the video, and each admitted after watching the video that it was factually accurate, though one later changed his mind after Stossel again contacted the manager of the organization. Moreover, the article cited as the reason for why Stossel's post was flagged lists climate change and forest management as two partial reasons for wildfires, quite similar to Stossel's actual claim.

The second item in the complaint involves another video with a similar fact pattern. Stossel again secured an interview with one of the putative reviewers, who concluded the factual representations in the video were correct. IMO it's less damning than the first, but interesting if true.

Stossel does seem to state a claim, he does seem to allege sufficient facts to prove actual malice (e.g. posting a fact check without reviewing the underlying material with reckless disregarding the truth). It's also only 25 pages with the relevant exhibits in the text, and tells a much clearer story as to why Stossel was injured by this.

I still would give him long odds at winning, but he might actually survive a motion to dismiss and get to discovery. This one at least doesn't seem like a stupid publicity stunt.

[0] https://docs.reclaimthenet.org/John-Stossel-vs-facebook.pdf

[1] https://www.factcheckzuck.com/assets/10-19-2020-Owens-Compla...

lr4444lr• 5 years ago

I don't know from where you are getting that libel in most US states requires malice.

IANAL, but I am pretty sure it's just saying something provable to be factually wrong that can be demonstrably linked as the precipitating cause to damages against the plaintiff.

mwcremer3• 5 years ago

Apparently not? See 'If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher"' here: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

fortuna862• 5 years ago

Via proprietary and non-transparent algorithmic content recommendation engines, they have all been publishers for a while now.

cblconfederate18• 5 years ago

they dont need to be a publisher to be sued for defamation

eli3• 5 years ago

That assumes anything they did was actually libelous which is... unlikely.

justinlink• 5 years ago

Claiming a journalist makes "false claims" and is "misleading" could be injurious to their reputation as a journalist. Which would hurt them in their business or profession.

It's not a slam dunk for him by any means, but I can understand why he filed.

newacct583• 5 years ago

That's... not what 230 is about at all. This myth just recycles itself again and again. Why do people insist on repeating it?

Section 230 immunizes a web content company from liability for statements made ON ITS SERVICE BY THIRD PARTIES (to wit: you can't sue Facebook for what its users say on it).

No one here thinks Facebook is immune to a liability claim for its own speech. No one is invoking 230 to defend it. 230 is not applicable. Why do people keep insisting it's some kind of boogeyman that can be "revoked" to get "big tech" in line? It doesn't apply here.

tomohawk• 5 years ago

If burning a flag is speach, then so is shadow banning, deplatforming, cancelling, and the whole lot.

If that speach is defamation, then it should also be actionable.

rdtsc• 5 years ago

It seems "Independent Fact Checkers" simply parrot whatever other mass media outlets say regardless of facts.

Facebook gets to say "look, someone else verified it", knowing that "someone else" here thinks and acts accordingly. If they don't they probably get fired and replaced.

Given that this about 2020 California fires, I suspect this had to do with Trump or someone from his administration blaming forest management. And then, naturally, most of the media made fun of that and quickly went to debunk it, including the aforementioned "Independent Fact Checkers". Had Stossel waited a year, and applied the article to the 2021 fires, the fact checkers might have given him a pass.

BitwiseFool• 5 years ago

"Independent Fact Checkers" is a rhetorical persuasion play. If you think about it, what does "Independent" actually mean? Does it really matter if a cohort of "fact checkers" aren't owned by the same conglomerate when they are cut from the same ideological cloth?

grayhatter3• 5 years ago

simply parrot whatever other mass media outlets say regardless of facts.

bias aside, are you asserting that generally mass media news is more lies than truths?

pharmakom• 5 years ago

I was once a fan of Stossel as a more mainstream libertarian voice. However, the segment he did where he slept rough for one night to “prove” that homelessness wasn’t so bad after all was so deeply offensive to me that I haven’t viewed any of his content since.

philovivero• 5 years ago

I personally know a guy who was homeless for over 15 years. He would soundly agree with Stossel's take. His opinion is... if I can attempt to summarise in a few words, that homeless people nearly universally choose that lifestyle, and if you ever give them a 100% guaranteed way out of it, they will run the other direction as fast as they can. I suggest you re-think your opinion of Stossel based on that segment.

spywaregorilla• 5 years ago

A quick google suggests that his opinion is strictly incorrect and its a myth.

The largest reason for homelessness is addiction.

throw_m2393393• 5 years ago

I personally know a guy who was homeless for over 15 years. He would soundly agree with Stossel's take. His opinion is... if I can attempt to summarise in a few words, that homeless people nearly universally choose that lifestyle, and if you ever give them a 100% guaranteed way out of it, they will run the other direction as fast as they can. I suggest you re-think your opinion of Stossel based on that segment.

---

that homeless people nearly universally choose that lifestyle,

I'm sorry but I can't really let that slide. A lot of homeless people aren't homeless because they chose that lifestyle and your anecdote doesn't change that fact. A lot of homeless people (roughly half of them) have serious psychological issues that make them barely able to function normally in society, this is why a significant number of war veterans are homeless. Don't make me started on people of all sorts or people that are unable to have a home because of their history (former criminals, illegal aliens, ...).

https://www.bbrfoundation.org/blog/homelessness-and-mental-i...

Few people would chose that lifestyle willingly, certainly not "universally".

I slept rough 2 times in my life, in dangerous places, and it was already bad, I can't imagine having to do that for months or years.

barbazoo• 5 years ago

That claim is beyond ignorant. I'd suggest reading up on the topic beyond individual anecdotes. There are hundreds of organizations dealing with that topic so there is more than enough information out there you can learn from. I recommend searches like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=study+reasons+for+homelessness to get started.

burkaman12• 5 years ago

Useful context for this story:

The original Facebook post with the video and fact check, which you can see without logging in: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1015712197...

The fact check: https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/climate-change-fores...

The fact checkers response to Stossel's complaint: https://climatefeedback.org/responding-to-stossel-tv-video-o...

ikeboy• 5 years ago

The last link appears to have been published last year and has nothing to do with the lawsuit.

burkaman12• 5 years ago

It addresses the same complaint that the lawsuit is based on.

therealbilly• 5 years ago

What could go wrong by having the Zuck and his minions fact check? Naturally it's going to lead to chaos. Tech Bros. have no business even going down this road. Stick to what you know and are good at.

Nasrudith2• 5 years ago

Nothing - it isn't chaos, it is the long standing status quo of free speech. Even a complete idiot flat earther can "fact check" NASA and no parade of horribles has come to pass from this.

ajkjk• 5 years ago

'tech bro' is a pointless pejorative here. Misplaced, too, since it doesn't have anything to do with this.

iszomer• 5 years ago

Aren't fact-checkers another semantic for censors?

president• 5 years ago

Fact check: While it's true that oftentimes fact-checkers use carefully crafted semantic arguments and an appeal to authority to validate or invalidate certain claims to sway opinion, they do not perform any censoring themselves.

My favorite is this one, quoted directly from Snopes:

Hillary Clinton used a hammer to smash her mobile phone during an FBI investigation.
What's True: One of Hillary Clinton's aides told the FBI that on two occasions he disposed of her unwanted mobile devices by breaking or hammering them.
What's False: Hillary Clinton did not personally destroy her phone with a hammer.

Source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-smash-phon...

readams2• 5 years ago

This sort of thing is sadly very frequent. The thumb is definitely on the scales. Fact checkers show their bias not only in things like this where they bend over backwards to say something is false, but also in what they choose to fact check.

scohesc• 5 years ago

Lying by omission is the nastiest, dirtiest, disgusting-est (lol) type of lying and misdirection.

It's the worst because the people that do it know they're doing it and they know they're doing it to hide the truth in a weaselly-worded way.

jandrese• 5 years ago

In theory a fact checker is a censor that can only censor content found to be not true.

A regular censor can remove content for any reason, most commonly because it violates community standards or is politically inconvenient for the people in power.

This distinction is important so calling fact checkers a censor is potentially misleading.

iammisc2• 5 years ago

Censors only censor content found to be not true by their political operatives. Do you honestly think there has even been a government filled with bureaucrats maliciously censoring what they themselves believe are truth? What kind of comically evil villain do you think were censors in other regimes?

After reading and hearing what Americans think about censorship, I am forced to conclude a significant portion of the population believes that -- so long as someone doesn't look like a childhood disney villain -- they're probably a noble person with noble goals and noble results.

kmonsen3• 5 years ago

No, fact checkers gives data and hopefully sources and explain why a statement is believed to be true or false. The original statement can still be seen.

Censoring usually completely removes the statement with usually no justification (perhaps national security or whatever).

Not saying this is the case here, but in general these days (mostly?) right wingers completely mistake what censorship means. It seems like someone ignored my opinion is the new standard on censorship.

justinzollars2• 5 years ago

Not saying this is the case here, but in general these days (mostly?) right wingers completely mistake what censorship means. It seems like someone ignored my opinion is the new standard on censorship.

You should create a separate twitter, and tweet moderately conservative ideas, and see what happens to that user, and your experience.

I have the unique life perspective of changing political parties from Hillary Clinton (Elected DNC Delegate) -> Libertarian based on my life experience in San Francisco, and personal perception that my original thoughts may have been wrong.

The way I'm treated on Twitter is entirely different. My comments, while not angry or aggressive, or extreme, find themselves hidden below the fold. When just a few years ago they were highlighted and never hidden. Trends I'm not interested in are suggested, I provide feedback to the AI and they are still suggested. I hide terms and they are highlighted. It is very Amorphous, but I suspect there is a machine learning categorization behind the scenes. It's more than coincidence.

MrZongle2• 5 years ago

It's soft censorship with extra steps.

frozenlettuce• 5 years ago

Opinions can't be fact-checked. You can only fact-check stuff that is objective (and the percentage of objective stuff in news is 0)

kmonsen3• 5 years ago

In my opinion that is obviously false and extremely silly. So if a news channel says for example the 49ers lost and another won there is a fact there and it is in the news. Similar for budgets, elections etc. Most of news are facts. Plane went missing, new shooting etc.

iammisc2• 5 years ago

Absolutely, but calling the man with the opinion a misleader is defamation.

rasengan0• 5 years ago

"In other words, to the question of whether a user was defamed through the announcement that content failed a “fact-check,” this Delaware court didn’t see a problem."

John Stossel, defamed? Who is that fool? What a fall from 20/20 TV entertainment days.

mplewis• 5 years ago

In his own words: "Give me a break!"

nichos• 5 years ago

I'm not sure 20/20 is the pinnacle of broadcasting. Either way, he's moved on to new media, like many others, including Larry King.

varelse• 5 years ago

Before they were against an unregulated free market they were certainly for it...

xqcgrek2• 5 years ago

NYTimes versus Sullivan needs to be overturned. It was decided in an entirely different era where yellow journalism was an exception rather than the rule.

vmception• 5 years ago

Can he sue in the UK for a higher probability of success than the US

bobthechef• 5 years ago

I'm surprised FB, YT, Google, etc and these fact-checking websites don't get sued more often. Or maybe they are, and there's some loophole like "entertainment purposes only". It's horrifying how many people defer to these websites without hesitation, as if they somehow transcend bias, malice, and incompetence. It's the privatized version of the ministry of truth.

John Stossel sues Facebook for allegedly defaming him with fact-check

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