“After 40+ years of reporting,” offers John Stossel on his Facebook page, “I now understand the importance of limited government.”
“I just sued Facebook,” Stossel posted yesterday. “I didn’t want to sue. I hate lawsuits. I tried for a year to reach someone at Facebook to fix things, but Facebook wouldn’t.”
What needs fixing?
Facebook’s fact-checkers dinged him with a “partly false”/“factual inaccuracies” label for his StosselTV video “Are We Doomed?” — without challenging any specific fact. And regarding another video, “Government Fueled Fires,” Todd Spangler of Variety quotes the case, which accuses Facebook of “falsely attributed to Stossel a claim he never made, and on that basis flagged the content as ‘misleading’ and ‘missing context,’ so that would-be viewers would be routed to the false attribution statement.”
Stephen Green writes in support of Stossel’s $2 million lawsuit, demurring only to add that there’s only one little problem: “If there’s a way through the courts to change Facebook’s bad behavior, it’s going to take a judgment with a lot more zeroes on the end.”
The lawsuit in question is a defamation lawsuit.
I confess: it is for breach of contract that I am most annoyed with Facebook. The company brought us all in with an openness ethos and now relentlessly pushes progressive talking points. I suppose it’s futile to compete with Facebook’s lawyers on grounds of Terms of Use agreements, so perhaps that’s why the focus is on slander and libel and all that.
It is as liars and promise-breakers that Facebook’s ideological tyrants most grate.
What they did to John Stossel is unconscionable. But, sadly, not nearly uncommon enough.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “Stossel Sues Facebook”
At least Stossel is prominent enough (and tilts left enough) to get Facebook’s attention and that of most of the media. I have never used it and never will.
Turning either to the legislature or the courts to fix social media censorship or mislabeling is looking to the government for help when experience shows that government involvement almost always makes things worse. Mr. Stossel should dump Facebook and post elsewhere.