SAN JOSE, Calif. (Legal Newsline) - John Stossel wasn’t defamed when Facebook called one of his videos “partly false” and said another was “missing context,” a federal judge ruled, tossing the conservative journalist’s lawsuit against Meta Platforms and a French scientific fact-checking organization.
Stossel, who has more than 1 million followers on Facebook, sued Meta and Science Feedback after Facebook added labels to two of his videos dealing with global warming. In one, Stossel criticized claims California wildfires were caused by global warming instead of bad development and forest management policies. Facebook, citing “independent fact-checkers,” said the video “could mislead people” and cited research by Science Feedback.
In the second video, “Are We Doomed?” Stossel challenged claims by people he called “climate alarmists” that rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere were a dire threat to the planet. After Stossel posted the video in April 2021, Facebook placed a label on it stating it had “Partly False Information,” again citing Science Feedback. In both cases, Facebook took other steps designed to reduce exposure and viewership of the videos, including downgrading their position in users’ news feeds.
Stossel sued, saying Facebook had mischaracterized his statements in the first video and defamed him in the second by claiming he presented false information when it was, in fact, true. But U.S. District Judge Virginia Demarchi in California dismissed both claims, saying Meta and Science Feedback were protected by the First Amendment and California’s anti-SLAPP law, which allows defendants to dismiss lawsuits based on statements of public interest.
“Simply because the process by which content is assessed and a label applied is called a `fact-check’ does not mean that the assessment itself is an actionable statement of objective fact,” the judge wrote in an Oct. 11 opinion. “The application of the `Partly False’ label to the Alarmism Video as part of Facebook’s fact-checking program reflects a subjective judgment about the accuracy and reliability of assertions made in the video.”
She also refused to allow Stossel to amend his complaint and try again, saying “any amendment of the pleadings would be futile because no additional allegations could alter the nature of the underlying statements challenged as defamatory.”