John Stossel Suing Facebook
September 29, 2021
By Paul Homewood
I covered John Stossel’s experience with Facebook’s “factcheckers” a few months ago.
Now he is suing Facebook for defamation:
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“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Projected result of this lawsuit? Both sets of lawyers will make loads of money and as Facebook has much deeper pockets they will try to bankrupt the claimant and then carry on doing exactly what they are doing.
How any sentient human being can engage with Zuckerberg’s wet dream is beyond me?
This is excellent news. Stossel is very much a moderate (luke warmer) and centrist on the political spectrum. I hope he has the guts to go all the way and not settle out of court. Of course the fine given to fakebook will not hurt them in the least, but a court finding that they smear, censor, lie and propagandise may wake up some of the wokingdead.
Now for someone to sue google (u-tube), the empire of evil.
A single fine won’t hurt them, but thousands of fines would. If he wins, others will have a go.
This “Solomon Asch” effect wrought by a single objective dissident nullifies the brainwashing of thousands of Trilbys. The same courage exemplified in the casting of a Libertarian vote also undermines mass-deception empowered by fake unanimity and bad examples.
I would take slight umbrage with John Stossel’s statement(s) that FB as a private company can cut him off at any time.
AS a private company which puts up content from others, FB enjoys the status of not being sued for what is put up on their platform and are only to remove that which is in violation of law (child porn, etc.). However, when they begin taking down content, shadow-banning, de-monetizing content, throwing people off with whom they disagree and now even doing it at government bidding they are in trouble. That makes them a “publisher” and open to lawsuits.
FB, Twitter, YouTube, etc. are trying to have it both ways. Censoring is NOT what the public wants even if the current administration is working hand-in-glove with these platforms to become nothing more than propaganda for them.
The so-called “fact checkers” are the usual cringe worthy group of losers who have been given power to misuse.
Agreed.
I would add that I believe that the big “platforms” have become public accommodations, hence can’t deny service.
They are trying to have it many, many ways at once. They are only interested in “fact checking” certain views. They still host all sorts of utter scientific nonsense about say healing crystals or a flat earth and of course allow vast amounts of utterly debunked disinformation in the form of socialist claims about economics.
As we have seen with the lab-leak theory for Covid, a supposed “conspiracy theory” by right-wing nutters and Trump supporters that is banned can very quickly become mainstream and probable. But still these businesses don’t understand their own limitations and biases.
As platforms, whether content is fact is irrelevant. I.e., “fact checkers” on a platform is an absurdity.
No one listens in on your telephone conversations to analyze content.
Wait . . . Snowden says they do.
Well, at least they don’t interrupt your conversations.
Not yet.
When just a handful of individuals (Twitter, Facebook et. al) have the power to censor the free speech of those “members” whose ideas and comments are those they dislike, the entire world is held hostage. The same holds true for “private” organizations like the AAAS…a bastion of climate change alarmism.
All blogs, social media and such ,like this one can and should censor comments that are outside their guidelines. Commenting is a privilege and there is only free speech against government censorship ( mainly in US as even Australias constitution doesnt mention it) and even areas like hard core smut etc are still restricted
Private censorship has always existed and is not covered by free speech
You should see the daily newspaper I pay a subscription for which allows comments on selected stories…all comments are moderated and very strictly. A recent one had a highly qualified medical professor who I thought was writing outside his area of expertise. I said so by including a university bio of his research interests . Not allowed even though I tried 3 or 4 times with different wording
The key issues here:
– for ideological / political reasons Facebook chose to deliberately lie in order to misrepresent what Stossel said and are trying to cover their antics by offloading the process to (expensive!) whoring activist fact checkers – who later risibly volunteered that they hadn’t even seen the content – let alone adjudged it worthy of the actions Facebook took.
If it goes to discovery – that will be interesting – as there will be communications. The FB >> fact checker process was obviously in part designed by lawyers.
They would probably have been safe to just say “we didn’t like it – so we took it down” – but they chose to lie and distort – and then tried to blame the defamatory lies on “fact checkers”.
Facebook and their appendages deserve a spanking -but- in the real world some judges are flat out bent some have ideological goggles that preclude them going against their own prejudices and there are a myriad of ways to sink an action. Stossel is using some heavyweight lawyers, not a “high street solicitor” – so this is set to run….
They could end up with someone like Judge Emmett Sullivan at the court …. It all depend in truth on the judge….
Anyway … YouTube litigators David Freiheit and Robert Barnes are keeping an eye on the case the technical details – imho worth following if you are interested in how it’s going.
Yep Via & Barnes ..great legal minds
I have avoided Faecepuke, Twit, Instagrim and whatnot, yet can’t get enough Stossel. This guy is the best candidate I can think of to draw law-changing spoiler votes into the Libertarian Party and cause The Kleptocracy to back away from some of its goons-with-guns “solutions” to imaginary hobgoblins. Thanks for illuminating this. –libertariantranslator
This “Solomon Asch” effect wrought by a single objective dissident nullifies the brainwashing of thousands of Trilbys. The same courage exemplified in the casting of a Libertarian vote also undermines mass-deception empowered by fake unanimity and bad examples.
Hope you are OK Paul ..36 hours with no post
7:30pm ITV Air Pollution special
I expect all the normal Islington misinformation.
Oh changed at last minute to ” Energy Bills: Counting The Costs?”
that replaces the billed : Air Pollution special
I still expect all the normal Islington misinformation.
I notice that one of the so-called fact checkers said the appropriate context should be the sea-level situation in one thousand years’ time. That would be a slam dunk for our team.
The fossil-fuel era will be nine hundred years in the past, and everything will be back to normal – whatever Nature decides at that time is normal. Perhaps a new ice-age?
A further context to consider is that during that thousand years a trillion people will die. Whether they also find their feet gradually getting wet seems
a minor problem. I am just being cheerful.
Big Tech is definitely overplaying its hand:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/329666/views-big-tech-worsen-public-wants-regulation.aspx
In some ways, the aging founders of it are merely kow-towing to what they imagine is “the happening thing.”