In an explosive yet completely unsurprising revelation, a recent court filing confirms that the “fact checkers” that Facebook employs to moderate content are merely offering up their own opinion on the “facts.”
According to the New York Post:
Facebook finally admitted the truth: The “fact checks” that social media use to police what Americans read and watch are just “opinion.”
That’s thanks to a lawsuit brought by celebrated journalist John Stossel, which has exposed the left’s supposed battle against “misinformation” as a farce.
Stossel posted a pair of videos that touched the third rail of liberal politics — climate change. Neither questioned whether climate change is real, but each talked about other issues, namely forest management and using technology to adapt. Yet the third party that Facebook contracts to review these pieces, Science Feedback, flagged them as “false,” or our favorite, “lacking context.”
Why? Science Feedback didn’t like Stossel’s “tone.” That is, you can’t write anything about climate change unless you say it’s the worst disaster in the history of humanity and we must spend trillions to fight it.
Stossel was “fact checked” by Climate Feedback, one of Facebook’s “fact checking” partners.
In response to Stossel’s disinformation claim, Facebook admitted that their “fact checks” are opinions in the passage below. Opinions aren’t subject to defamation claims (while false assertions of fact are).
We’ve had our fair share of run ins with Facebook’s fact checkers, with PolitiFact’s Tom Kertscher, officially topping the list as the dimmest fact checker we’ve encountered. Below is just a sampling of my prior articles analyzing his godawful “fact checks”:
- Politifact Botches Another Fact Check on New York vs. Florida Coronavirus Deaths: Tom rules the claim that New Jersey and New York had five times more COVID deaths per-capita than Florida in August 2020 “mostly false,” despite this literally being true.
- Politifact Tries and Fails Fact Checking Claim That California Has Six Extra Representatives Due to Illegals: Tom attempts to debunk the claim that California has six extra representatives due to illegal aliens being counted in the census by emailing a professor at a school no one has ever heard of and asking him how many he thinks it would be. The professor answered that California only has two extra seats as a result of illegals being counted in the census, and thus Tom rates the initial claim “false” without actually showing any work for how that figure was calculated.
- PolitiFact Botches Fact Check on Maxine Waters Inciting Violence: Tom says it’s “mostly false” that Maxine Waters said Trump supporters aren’t welcome because she actually just said “Trump cabinet members should be singled out in public.” In separate comments that Tom would’ve found had he done a google search, Waters had said “I did not threaten [Trump] constituents and supporters. I do that all the time, but I didn’t do that that time.”
- PolitiFact’s Worst Fact Checker Plays Defense for VP Harris – Fails Miserably: Here Tom attempts to make us again question our own ears, and tells us it’s actually not true that the likes of VP Harris casted doubt on the COVID vaccine when Trump was in office by stating that “Video clips appear to show Joe Biden and Kamala Harris raising doubts about COVID-19 vaccines, but they were raising concerns about the rollout by then-President Donald Trump, not the vaccines themselves.” That’s contracted by Harris’ own statements in Tom’s own article: “Well, I think that’s going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump. And it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about. I will not take his word for it. He wants us to inject bleach. I — no, I will not take his word.”
- PolitiFact’s Worst Fact Checker Tries (and Fails) at Explaining Bidenflation: Tom attempts to argue that the highest inflation in over three decades isn’t actually that bad by focusing only on the prices of five items… that he admits have increased in price.
Another PolitiFact flunkee that came in a close second for the “worst fact checker ever” title is Dniael Flunke, the continued employment of which also proves that the leadership over at the “fact checking” publications don’t actually care about facts any more than their staffers.
In a victory for Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense team before his acquittal days later, Judge Bruce Schroeder threw out the misdemeanor gun charge against him, stating that “it was unclear whether the rifle used qualified under the Wisconsin statute, and the prosecutors in the case chose not to press their case on the single misdemeanor count.”
Amusingly, back in August 2020, the Flunke had preemptively assumed Kyle’s guilt on that charge, rating the claim that Kyle legally possessed his rifle without parental supervision “false.”
An editors note doubling down has since been added to their discredited “fact check.”
Flunke has also provided similarly embarrassing “fact checks” for USA Today, another publication without standards.
Back in September, Funke attempted to fact check Biden being captured on video checking his watch during the dignified transfer ceremony for those we thirteen service members we lost in the Kabul terror attack.
Funke claimed, wrongly, that Biden had only checked his watch once, and it was after the ceremony.
Two Gold Star fathers, Darin Hoover and Mark Schmitz who were eyewitnesses at the event, went on the record stating that they saw Biden repeatedly checking his watch during the ceremony and one of them says it was “the most disrespectful thing” he has “ever seen.” According to them, it didn’t just happen once, but thirteen times overall.
A third Gold Star parent, Shana Chappell, wrote in a Facebook post: “I watched you disrespect us all 5 different times by checking your watch!!! What the f*ck was so important that you had to keep looking at your watch????”
Eventually Funke changed his ruling from “partly false” to “missing context,” I suppose because he knew he had to issue some sort of correction but was too embarrassed to admit he was 100% wrong.
When Tom and Flunke were reached for comment on if this recent court filing revelation explains how anyone as incompetent as they are remains employed, no response was given.
Matt Palumbo is the author of The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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