John Stossel (Apparently Still Alive) Suing Facebook For Fact-Checking His Online Climate Lies
Links at original.
Facebook is barely doing anything about climate disinformation, but even that is too much for deniers. The social media giant recently announced that it was throwing some chump change at fact checkers and pointing more people to an expanded climate information center that would debunk climate myths and give users a dose of reality. But it’s attempted PR score was punctured by a report that found that even when a lie is fact checked (specifically the frozen windmills during the Texas blackout, based on a picture from 2014 in Sweden) less than 1% of the content featuring the disinformation was flagged as such by Facebook.
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Stossel’s re-litigating of the two Climate Feedback fact checks against his videos is a snooze-fest predicated on the absurd notion that he’s not actually arguing what he’s arguing and because part of the fact check was originally for someone else’s disinformation and not his, it doesn’t count. But what’s interesting is that he claims in the complaint that views for his video about wildfires and climate evaporated after the fact check (good!) and that after his video on climate alarmism got fact checked, “there was a dramatic drop in both views of that video and all Stossel’s other videos, and of the associated advertising revenue, which reduced by nearly half, from approximately $10,000 a month to approximately $5,500 a month.”
Perhaps the system works after all, as apparently Stossel is not considered celebrity-enough to be on Facebook’s whitelist that exempts “PR fire” accounts from fact-checking!
Interestingly, though, Stossel doesn’t mention in the lawsuit something that may actually make his claim to damages stronger. Because at the end of 2016 Stossel became part of the Koch’s “educational” program and starting at least in 2017, John Stossel’s been one of the Charles Koch Institute’s top contractors, netting $1.5 million in those three years. If Facebook’s measures to limit false content means he can’t make good on his Koch contract, assuming it continued into 2020 and 2021, he might just have a case! But apparently we’ll have to wait for the Koch 990s to come out to see, because for some reason, Stossel doesn’t seem eager to admit the connection, and make anyone wonder if his videos being challenged by fact checkers are in fact deliverables for a grant to the godfather of climate disinformation.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/9/27/2054657/-John-Stossel-Suing-Facebook-For-Fact-Checking-his-Reheated-Koch-Funded-Climate-Disinformation
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