Facebook (aka “Meta”) has admitted in court that the “fact-checks” used by the site to blacklist non-corporate media content are actually opinion-based labels which do not conduct any real fact-checking of information posted to the site. The evidence was revealed during the court proceeding for a defamation case filed by John Stossel.

Stossel’s work on climate change was labeled by Facebook as “false and misleading.” In response to Stossel’s suit, Facebook wrote that the company cannot be sued for defamation in relation to the fact-checking. Defamation is defined as “making false and harmful assertions.”

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Under this definition, Facebook argued that the fact-checking and associated labels on the posts across their sites “constitute protected opinion.”

In the United States legal system, opinions are not subject to defamation claims. Libel law protects opinions, which is the basis of Facebook’s defensive claim. The definition of “opinion” is “a view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.”

By their own lawyers’ arguments, Facebook’s fact-checks are little more than the politically biased opinions held by Facebook employees and/or third-party companies hired to undertake the fake fact-checking process on all posts. . . .

In their court defense, however, Facebook’s lawyers admit:

…Stossel’s claims focus on the fact-check articles written by Climate Feedback, not the labels affixed through the Facebook platform. The labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion…

Facebook’s fact-checking services have been called out for stoking a civil war in Ethiopia. When freelance journalists publish stories and post them to Facebook, the work is listed as “hate speech and defamation.” Facebook allows for pro-government accounts, some with well over 200,000 followers to post photographs of journalists and to openly call for their arrest, none of which is “fact-checked,” according to Vice News.

You can read the full court document here.

(Excerpt from National Pulse. Photo credit: Getty Images.)