Meet the New Iranian President of the Norwegian Parliament

December 14, 2021 John

One small step for a man, one giant leap for…the Mullahs?

BY BRUCE BAWER

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/meet-new-iranian-president-norwegian-parliament-bruce-bawer/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

In Norway, the king is head of state, and the prime minister is head of government. But there’s a third individual who, under law, is ranked in the official hierarchy ahead of any political figure and just after the sovereign himself. That person is the president of Stortinget, Norway’s Parliament.

As a result of the national elections on September 13, the so-called conservative coalition under Erna Solberg that had governed since 2013 was replaced by a center-left coalition under the new prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre. Eva Kristin Hansen, a Labor Party Member of Parliament from the northern county of Sør-Trøndelag, was named president of Parliament.

Barely weeks after her installation, Hansen was at the center of a minor controversy. The Christian People’s Party - which is the traditional home of Norway’s religious right and which, dwindling steadily in size over the last generation, clung on to power by its fingernails after the September elections, winning 3.8% of the vote and only three out of 169 seats - demanded that nursing Members of Parliament be allowed to breast-feed in the parliamentary chamber. Hansen responded by saying that nobody had ever told them they couldn’t and that she’d take action to ensure that this was understood by all.

Well, that one was resolved easily enough. But a bigger scandal was waiting in the wings. In November, it was revealed that Hansen, who represents the city of Trondheim, 250 miles north of Oslo, the capital, has actually lived since 2014 in Ski, a town just outside of Oslo. To maintain her official residency in Trondheim, she’d listed a room in the home of Trond Giske, a Labor politician who resigned from Parliament in 2018 after a sexual-harassment scandal, as her official residence.

But that wasn’t all. Until 2017, Hansen had also occupied, at the taxpayers’ expense, a furnished government-supplied apartment in Oslo - a clear violation of rules requiring that Members of Parliament live at least 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Oslo to qualify for one of these freebies. She was, it turned out, one of several MPs who’d cheated the public in this fashion. While keeping her seat in Parliament, Hansen stepped down as president of Parliament.

Which led to yet another controversy. For in Hansen’s place, Støre appointed a Labor Party MP named Masud Gharahkhani.

Gharahkhani was not a parliamentary superstar. Born in Tehran in 1982, he and his family came to Norway as refugees in 1987. He and his wife, who met in 2002 while Gharahkhani was on vacation in Iran - yes, we’ll get back to that - were married in Turkey in 2010. He works as a radiographer at Blefjell Hospital and has only been an MP for four years. In 2018, Aftenposten ran a splashy profile of him under the headline “I eat hot dogs. I drink alcohol. And I believe in God and am a Muslim, in my way.”

Although Gharahkhani was formally elevated to his new position by a vote of the full Parliament, it was really up to the Labor Party, specifically Prime Minister Støre, to fill the slot. In picking him, Støre passed over a host of Members with greater seniority and higher profiles. Given the Labor Party’s current racial and religious politics, his selection was not terribly surprising. Nor was the mainstream media’s uncritical response.

In the alternative media, however, there was pushback. Hans Rustad, editor of document.no, wrote on November 24 Gharahkhani’s appointment made one wonder if Støre and company “know which country they’re living in.” Rustad noted that the announcement came only days after Kapital (a financial magazine like Forbes or Fortune) named the Pakistani-Norwegian MP Hadia Tajik, Labor’s Deputy Leader, “Norway’s most powerful woman.” Also in recent weeks, another Pakistani MP, Abid Q. Raja, won the annual Booksellers Prize for his memoir Min skyld.

While Raja, an MP since 2013, has been famous in Norway for years (two decades ago, when he was the highly visible spokesman for the country’s largest mosque, I predicted that he’d become its first Muslim prime minister), Rustad pointed out that neither Tajik nor Gharahkhani is on most Norwegians’ radar. Does Støre care? Probably not. Like Democrats in the U.S., Labor Party folks in Oslo look upon most of their fellow countrymen as deplorables, and view foreignness as a plus, not a minus.

Rustad’s piece was followed by a December 8 article in which Helge Lurås, editor of resett.no, noted that Gharahkhani is a dual citizen of Iran and Norway and that he and his wife both have relatives in Iran. How often, asked Lurås, have they been back? Others, after all, have been forced to resign from high-ranking positions because of less intimate foreign ties. Per Sandberg had to quit as Fisheries Minister after taking a vacation in Iran; a Norges Bank official was forced out because his wife was Chinese.

Gharahkhani’s situation is much more delicate. He and his wife rely on the mullahs to provide them with visas if they want to visit family members in Iran. And because Gharahkhani does have loved ones there, he’s someone whom the Iranian government could easily subject to pressure and bend to their will. At the very least, their power over his and his wife’s relatives could incline Gharahkhani to temper his public comments about the monstrous regime in Tehran.

Yet nobody in the Norwegian government or mainstream media seems willing to take this problem seriously. Gharahkhani refuses even to say whether he’s used his Iranian passport to travel to Iran, and, if so, how many times. Years ago, a couple of agents of the Norwegian Police Security Service grilled me behind closed doors, because they considered me a potential threat to national security. Why, then, be so lax about Gharahkhani, who’s actually in a position of power?

In Norway, there’s a 67-year-old comedian named Otto Jespersen. Years ago, when I watched Norwegian TV far more often than I do now, I found him quite funny; for a comedian in Norway, he was refreshingly un-PC. Addressing Norwegian Muslims in one bit from the early 2000s that could never be repeated today, he hilariously took on honor killing, forced marriage, stoning, and other Islamic practices, and in conclusion advised them to start celebrating Norway’s Constitution Day, May 17, instead of the anniversary of 9/11.

But Jespersen was tamed soon enough. In 2003, in protest against the Iran War, he burned an American flag on camera. Sometime later, he set fire to some pages from the Old Testament. (He’s admitted that he wouldn’t dare burn a Koran, because he doesn’t want to be killed.) His lowest point came in 2008 when he said the following: “I would like to take the opportunity to remember all the billions of fleas and lice that lost their lives in German gas chambers, without having done anything wrong other than settling on persons of Jewish background."

Anyway, after reasonable concerns were raised about Gharahkhani’s Iranian ties, Jespersen saw an opportunity for his particular brand of comedy. The other evening, in a monologue for TV2, he wondered aloud why Rustad hadn’t gone after other people with foreign backgrounds who’ve taken important jobs from Norwegians. Jespersen proceeded to list high-ranking politicians whose ancestors came from Denmark and Scotland and to point out that one of Norway’s top soccer stars is English. His clincher: King Haakon, grandfather of the current monarch, was Danish - so, by all rights, King Harald should abdicate and hand his throne over to a real Norwegian.

It was painfully safe, predictable stuff, the equivalent of the unfunny PC claptrap served up in the U.S. these days on the late-night talk shows and Saturday Night Live. Like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, Jespersen transformed some years ago from a truly edgy comic into a hack and a tool, toeing his masters’ political line while pretending to speak truth to power. In 2021, of course, it’s people like Rustad and Lurås who are speaking truth to power. Just as, thanks to the irrational xenophilia of Norway’s mainstream media and of the Norwegian equivalent of the D.C. Swamp, it’s people like Musad Gharahkhani and Hadia Tajik and Abid Q. Raja who increasingly hold in their hands the future of this little land of Hansens, Olsens, and Larsens.

Targeting Children With Propaganda & Tech: Transhumanism Part Three

December 14, 2021 John

Deep State advocates of transhumanism are targeting children and young people with propaganda through entertainment and education, warns The New American magazine Senior Editor Alex Newman in this episode of Behind The Deep State. Among other tactics, popular shows produced by the BBC and others are portraying transhumanism as hip, cool, exciting, and more. At the same time, children are being subjected to all sorts of intrusive technological schemes in schools that monitor their brain activity and promote transhumanist ideas as education increasingly moves into the digital world. Alex warns that even if the Deep State can’t get older people to participate in this agenda, aiming for young people is clearly a strategic effort to move the plan forward. The New American: http://www.thenewamerican.com/

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Deep State Transhumanists: Becoming 'Gods,' or Building 'God'? Part Four

Deep State promoters of transhumanism are totalitarians with an affinity for Communist Chinese tyrant who believe that man is evolving through technological and biological upgrades to become like a god, warns The New American magazine's Alex Newman in part 4 of his series on transhumanism for Behind The Deep State. Some believe and say publicly that they are actually building an Artificial Intelligence god that should be worshipped. Others believe they will achieve immortality by fusing their consciousness with computers. But like Hegel's outrageous view of the state as god, these horrific and heretical ideas will end in disaster, and the God of the Bible addresses these views directly from Genesis to the New Testament.

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SEE ALSO:

PATRIOT NURSE: You Deserve to Know: Here's What YT is doing to Us!

FRANCE: Eric Zemmour Holds His First Presidential Rally

December 14, 2021 John

Eric Zemmour's Presidential Candidacy Speech (English Edition)

BY HUGH FITZGERALD

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/12/eric-zemmour-holds-his-first-presidential-rally;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

On Sunday, December 5, Eric Zemmour, the writer, journalist, and television pundit who recently declared his candidacy for President of France, held a rally at Villepinte, in Seine Saint-Denis, for his supporters. He had just announced the formation of a new political party that he has calls “La reconquête,” an allusion to the Reconquista of Spain by Christians, who over many centuries managed to take back their land from the Muslims who had conquered it long before. About 10,000 people showed up to listen to their candidate. And there were others who showed up as well, but not to listen. They came instead determined to spoil the occasion, to prevent Zemmour from speaking or, if they could not prevent him outright, then they would create such a racket, including fighting with his supporters, that it would be impossible to hear him over the din they were determined to create. These far-left hooligans and bully-boys call themselves “antifas,” short for “anti-fascists,” and “peaceful protesters,” but in their storm-trooping attempts to silence everyone they don’t like, they show themselves to be as fascistic as they come, worthy heirs of Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Chief among these “antifas” at the rally were members of the group SOS-Racisme, a so-called “anti-racist” group that likes to show up and disrupt the speeches of anyone they don’t like. These days, for SOS-Racism, a “racist” means anyone who expresses the slightest misgivings about the large presence of Muslims in France. It doesn’t matter that Muslims are not a race. Dare to question their sheer wonderfulness, and you are labeled a “racist,” permanently consigned to the Outer Darkness. The eloquent Zemmour, of course, drives them half-crazy with hate.

The security men at the Zemmour rally had to confiscate from 39 people, many of whom were members of SOS-Racisme, certain piquant items that have little to do with “peaceful protests.” Among those items that these “antifas” were attempting to bring into the hall were Molotov cocktails, bottles of acid, paving stones, rocks, knives, and at least one grenade. Strangely, very few French newspapers or other media mentioned this confiscation of potentially deadly weapons. Had those weapons been seized from Zemmour’s supporters, instead of from his enemies, it would have been all over the news.

As Zemmour walked through the crowd toward the platform in front, a man — reporters said he was an Arab — reached out, grabbed Zemmour, and put him in a headlock. In freeing himself, Zemmour injured his wrist. Doctors told him he should rest for nine days.

When Zemmour began to speak, the “antifas,” many of them members of SOS-Racisme, started to yell and scream to keep him from being heard. Some stood on their chairs. A dozen militants opened their shirts, revealing t-shirts that spelled out an anti-Zemmour message. Zemmour persevered. At some point, when La Marseillaise was being sung, a group of Muslims began to shout “Allahu akbar.” It brought to mind, naturally, that famous scene in Casablanca, where the French and the desperate refugees in Rick’s Café sing the Marseillaise so passionately and loudly as to drown out the German soldiers who, led by Major Strasser, had been singing “The Watch on the Rhine.” At Zemmour’s rally, those who sang La Marseillaise drowned out that handful of Allahu-akbaring Muslims. Too bad that scene wasn’t caught on camera.

Soon enough, real fights broke out between Zemmour’s supporters and those who were doing what they had come to do – yelling and chanting in order to drown out the candidate. Insults, then fistfights, and eventually, chairs started to be thrown in all directions. It’s unclear who started throwing the chairs, but I suspect it was the “antifas,” because left-wing sites reported only that “chairs flew through the air”; had it been Zemmour’s supporters who started the chair-throwing, such sites would certainly have wanted it known. One girl, with blood streaming dramatically from a minor head wound down her left cheek, refused to have a bandage put on, saying “Ne me soignez pas la tête, il faut que ça fasse des images,” which in rough translation means “No need for first aid to my head, we need to get some photos.” Zemmour’s opponents were doing whatever they could to make him and his supporters look bad.

Another telling episode unfolded when a girl, described as a “militant” of SOS-Racisme, was asked by a reporter: “What do you think of this flier sent out yesterday from SOS-Racisme, that says ‘Paris fera taire Eric Zemmour’ (‘Paris will make Eric Zemmour shut up’)? Isn’t that against the ‘freedom of speech’ that you claim you want to defend?” The girl, nonplussed, with a look of confusion, kept repeating under her breath only “I don’t know. I’m not informed. It’s not my job to talk about that.” (In French: “Mais interrogée par le duo Marschall / Truchot sur une affiche de SOS Racisme demandant hier de ‘faire taire Eric Zemmour,’ la jeune est restée sans voix répétant en bouche ‘je ne sais pas’, ‘je ne suis pas au courant,’ ‘ce n’est pas à moi de dire ça.'”)

About that damage to his wrist, and the nine days of doctor-recommended rest: assuming he takes that advice, he’ll be able to tape campaign speeches to his heart’s content, far from SOS-Racisme’s ignoble strife, with those screaming recruits from SOS-Racisme, those fistfights, those flying chairs, and that winsome face deliberately kept smeared with blood for the photographers.

Pakistan: Mosque gives girls lessons in how to behead a person accused of blasphemy

December 14, 2021 John

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/12/pakistan-mosque-gives-girls-lessons-in-how-to-behead-a-person-accused-of-blasphemy;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Why not? The Qur’an says to do it. Shouldn’t people know how?

“When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks…” (Qur’an 47:4)

Anyone who finds this revolting or otherwise objectionable is a greasy Islamophobe with a “white savior complex.”

Students of Red Mosque Islamabad practising how to behead a person accused of blasphemy. Pakistan’s “kamyab jawan” (successful youth) project proceeding rather well. pic.twitter.com/fgZXXgL9bO

— Gul Bukhari (@GulBukhari) December 9, 2021

“‘Beheading’ training being imparted to girl students in mosque, Video goes viral,” by Arpit Birtharia, NewsTrack, December 11 2021:

…Meanwhile, a video has now surfaced from Pakistan that exposes Pakistan’s violent, hardcore Islamic, and chaotic face in blasphemy. The video is said to be from the Red Mosque in Islamabad.

The viral video shows girl students being taught in the mosque how to behead a person if someone insults religion. In the background of the video, the slogan of radical Tehreek-e-Lubbek Pakistan (TLP) is also heard on the loudspeaker. This is the same slogan that supporters of the TLP were chanting while killing Sri Lankan factory manager Priantha Kumara in Sialkot and burning her body. Tell me, recently there was a peace agreement between the Government of Pakistan and the TLP. Before the agreement, the TLP had created a stir in Pakistan.

The video was shared by Pakistani journalist and social activist Gul Bukhari on Twitter. He has claimed that students of Lal Masjid in Islamabad are practicing beheading of a person accused of blasphemy. Pakistan’s ‘Successful Youth’ project is progressing well. Hundreds of girls and women are seen in religious costumes in the video. In front of the girls, women are seen beheading an effigy with a sword. ‘Kaamyaab Jawan’ is a scheme of the Government of Pakistan, which is said to encourage education, employment, and engagement for the youth….

New Pfizer Board Member Held Top Roles at Facebook & Gates Foundation

December 14, 2021 John

Sue Desmond-Hellmann: What Matters Most to Me and Why

Gates Foundation's Desmond-Hellmann & Partnerships

BY LUIS MIGUEL

SEE: https://thenewamerican.com/new-pfizer-board-member-held-top-roles-at-facebook-gates-foundation/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, who currently serves on Pfizer Inc.’s board of directors, was previously the Lead Independent Director at Facebook, which has frequently censored user content related to the coronavirus outbreak and vaccines. She was also CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2014-2020.

Hellmann joined the tech giant’s board in March 2013 and held the position of Lead Independent Director from June 2015 until October 30th, 2019, not long before the first reported case of COVID-19.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, and CEO, said, “Sue has been a wonderful and thoughtful voice on the board for six years, and I’m personally grateful to her for everything she has done for this company,” with regard to her departure from the company.

“I remain positive about Facebook and the mission to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Facebook’s Shareholders require a Board of Directors that is fully engaged and committed to addressing the critical issues confronting Facebook at this time,” Hellmann said of her tenure at Facebook.

“Unfortunately, increasing demands from my CEO role, my extended family, and my own health makes it no longer possible for me to commit the necessary time and energy required to properly serve Facebook and its shareholders,” she added in a public statement.

During Hellmann’s time on the Pfizer board, Facebook has pushed campaigns to censor posts that question the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines. Leaked internal documents from the social-media company reveal algorithms aimed at “drastically reduc[ing] user exposure to vaccine hesitancy (VH) in comments.”

The 15-page document — titled “Vaccine Hesitancy Comment Demotion” — summarizes its goal as “reducing the visibility of these comments represents another significant opportunity for us to remove barriers to vaccination that users on the platform may potentially encounter.”

Potentially presenting another conflict of interest, Hellman also serves on President Joe Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which is described by the White House as the “sole body of external advisors charged with making science, technology, and innovation policy recommendations to the President.”

Hellmann’s former post at the Gates Foundation isn’t surprising for someone on the board of a vaccine manufacturer and who worked for a company that censors vaccine-skeptic content. Bill Gates is a major advocate for vaccines and sees shots as a way of reducing the global population.

The Gates Foundation has been supporting a program testing biometric ID vaccination records in Africa. Notably, the foundation has reportedly sent $54 million to fund “global health” projects in China since the outbreak of COVID-19. This includes major sums of cash to institutions controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as well as collaborators of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Facebook has also heavily censored content that offers evidence of voter fraud during the 2020 election.

As The New American recently reported, the founder of the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) — the election group heavily supported by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — is a former fellow at the Chinese state-funded Ash Center, which has advised officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who have been sanctioned for human-rights abuses by the U.S. government.

The CTCL received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan with an investment of 99 percent of the couple’s wealth from their Facebook shares over their lifetime) with the ostensible aim of “modernizing” America’s voting system.

The Amistad Project, an election-watchdog group, alleged that CTCL “used the money to illegally inflate turnout in key Democratic swing states as part of this effort.”

In a new defamation lawsuit against Facebook by journalist John Stossel, the social-media company’s attorneys appear to admit that the platform’s so-called “fact checks” are nothing more than “protected opinion.”

In a brief, in that case, Facebook’s attorneys assert that the “fact check” labels the company uses are not fact — but opinion.

From the brief: “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.”

DOD Considering Mandatory COVID Boosters for Troops

December 14, 2021 John

BY VERONIKA KYRYLENKO

SEE: https://thenewamerican.com/dod-considering-mandatory-covid-boosters-for-troops/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

U.S. military leadership is mulling whether to require COVID booster shots for troops while also acknowledging that thousands of active-duty personnel have yet to take even their first shot.

During the Friday press briefing, Department of Defense Press Secretary John Kirby was first asked about some 40,000 unvaccinated troops across all branches and whether the Pentagon was satisfied with the progress, to which Kirby replied, “There’s more work to do,” while reassuring the press that the figures are “trending in the right direction.”

Kirby further noted that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s expectation is “is 100 percent vaccination,” as he noted that about 96.4 percent of all active-duty personnel have gotten at least one shot, with 90 percent being fully vaccinated. That percentage, however, drops when members of the National Guard and Reserves are included. The recent data shows that about 74 percent of the total military force, including the active duty, Guard, and Reserve, are fully vaccinated, per the press secretary.

Kirby stressed that COVID vaccination is a “mandatory military readiness requirement” that all soldiers must follow, except those who obtained an exemption on medical or other legal grounds.

Getting any kind of exemption from COVID vaccination in the military, however, is a difficult task. As The New American has previously reported, the Navy only granted six permanent medical exemptions while approving zero religious waiver requests, per the Navy site. In comparison, the Air Force has granted 1,866 airmen and Space Force guardians exemptions from the COVID vaccination, the vast majority for medical reasons. Notably, as of November 13, over 16,000 U.S. service members in all military branches have submitted applications for a religious exemption, but none was granted.

Kirby was also asked about a recent comment from President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that “it’s going to be a matter of when not if” boosters will be needed for individuals to be considered “fully vaccinated.” He previously said boosters are a “part of the standard regimen and not just a bonus.”

Kirby called the question “terrific,” and continued, “There are active discussions here in the department at the policy level about booster shots and whether or not to make those mandatory.” No final decisions have been made yet, Kirby said, but he stressed the department will be “transparent” about the possible updates and said the department is looking into the efficacy of boosters.

The DOD’s comments came days after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had expanded its COVID booster recommendation to include 16- and 17- years-olds. The CDC now says that those who received either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna mRNA vaccine should get a booster dose at least six months after they complete their primary series. Anyone who received the Johnson & Johnson shot should get a booster dose two months after they complete their single-dose primary series. The nation’s top health agency specifies that people may choose to mix-and-match COVID shots even though no long-term safety studies have been done to support such a recommendation.

There is a possibility that additional annual boosters will be recommended/mandated since the immune protection generated by the vaccines lasts for a very limited time.

The Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has recently said that annual “revaccination” against COVID will become the “most likely scenario” that will keep people “really safe,” since the virus mutates and immunity wanes. The statement has been previously echoed by other vaccine manufacturers, as The New American reported.

Dr. Fauci “hypothesized” in the recent interview with STAT that “the current vaccines will provide enough protection against the new variant for most vaccinated and boosted individuals,” and that Omicron-specific boosters may not be needed, even though the pharmaceutical companies are already working on their development.

As of late November, 79 active-duty personnel have died of COVID complications.

At the same time, the rate of vaccine-related injuries and deaths connected to the vaccines has far outpaced the number of COVID-related casualties in the military, says Dr. Lee Merritt. While the exact number of adverse reactions to the jabs is unknown, the doctor says, “With the vaccine program we’ve ostensibly killed more of our young active-duty people than COVID did,” citing numerous reports of tumors and over 80 cases of myocarditis (as of August) following the COVID shots given to the military.

In November, Lieutenant Colonel Theresa Long, a senior U.S. Army aerospace medicine specialist who has treated soldiers injured by COVID vaccines, testified in the U.S. Senate that COVID vaccines pose a greater danger to the health of American servicemen and military readiness than COVID itself and condemned the Biden administration for treating men and women in uniform as “lab rats.” Long added that the Army Public Health Command confirmed to her that adverse events following the vaccination were not tracked, traced, or monitored.

Currently, the Biden administration is facing multiple legal challenges to the COVID vaccine mandate for the military, as The New American has reported (here and here).

Facebook Makes a Shocking Admission About Its Fact Check Labels in Court Filing

December 14, 2021 John

ABOVE: 100 cardboard cutouts of the Facebook founder and CEO stand outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (Kevin Wolf/AP images for AVAAZ)

BY PAULA BOLYARD

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2021/12/13/shocker-facebook-admits-in-court-docs-that-its-fact-check-labels-are-opinions-n1541089;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

As regular readers of PJ Media know, we’ve been battling Facebook’s fact-checkers for the last few years, especially on topics where there are genuine—and legitimate—differences of opinion. More specifically, the topics of climate change and COVID-19 have triggered numerous fact checks in recent months, not because we’ve gotten the facts wrong, but because Facebook’s fact-checkers put their “experts” up against ours and determined that theirs are right and ours are wrong. The only legitimate authorities on the given topic are the ones the fact-checkers have handpicked—those who agree with their point of view. They did this early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, citing experts who insisted that the virus did not originate in a lab in Wuhan while dismissing all experts who claimed otherwise. When evidence emerged that the virus likely did originate in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Facebook’s fact-checkers stopped flagging articles making that claim, but they never apologized for their mistake or for defaming good people and reliable sites—and for throttling traffic to those sites.

Now, Facebook is admitting what many of us have known to be true for some time: Its fact-check labels are opinions rather than definitive renderings of the facts. In court filings (embedded below) related to a defamation lawsuit by John Stossel, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, claimed that the platform did not defame the veteran journalist because they were merely offering an opinion when labeling his videos about climate change as “partly false.”

Meta insists that Stossel was not defamed because the fact-checks were written by a third-party organization. All Facebook did was affix labels to the videos based on… the articles written by the fact-checkers and the conclusions they reached. As such, the labels themselves merely “constitute protected opinion,” said Meta’s lawyers. [Emphasis added]

Essentially, Facebook is trying to divorce itself from the claims being made by the fact-checkers it relies on, in this, a French climate-alarmism operation called Climate Feedback (operating under the umbrella of Science Feedback), which Stossel said defamed him by attaching disparaging labels to his videos related to the climate change debate.

But according to Meta, “even if Stossel could attribute Climate Feedback’s separate webpages to Meta, the challenged statements on those pages are neither false nor defamatory.”

But Facebook “defamed Stossel, with malice,” the journalist’s attorneys wrote in the initial complaint. “First, they attributed to Stossel a claim he did not make, and which caused his viewers to shun him. Defendants made this false attribution recklessly before they had even reviewed his video. And even after Stossel brought the issue to Defendants’ attention, Defendants refused to correct their speech, and intentionally left the false attribution online for anyone to see, where it remains today.”

“With this lawsuit, Stossel asks the Court to declare that Defendants are not permitted to hide behind the masquerade of a ‘fact-check’ to defame him with impunity and that they must make him whole for the damage they have maliciously caused by their provably false and disparaging statements about his reporting,” the complaint added.

Meta admits that Facebook relies on “independent third-party fact-checkers to identify, rate, and analyze potential misinformation on the Facebook platform” and says the use of “independent” fact-checkers ensures “that Meta does not become the arbiter of truth on its platforms,” according to the filing. “Though Meta identifies potential misinformation for fact-checkers to review and rate, it leaves the ultimate determination whether the information is false or misleading to the fact-checkers. And though Meta has designed its platforms so that fact-checker ratings appear next to content that the fact-checkers have reviewed and rated, it does not contribute to the substance of those ratings.”

Further, Meta claims that just because they’ve contracted with fact-checkers to determine which content is true and which is false, the fact that they independently arrive at their conclusions shields Facebook from responsibility for their claims.

“For an agency relationship to exist between Meta and Climate Feedback or Science Feedback, Meta must have either actually assented to the Feedback entities acting on its behalf or have held them out as authorized to act on Meta’s behalf,” the social-media giant’s lawyers say. “Meta’s public identification of the fact-checkers, including Climate Feedback and Science Feedback, as ‘independent’… without more, defeats any inference that Meta assented to either Feedback entity acting on its behalf.”

As Stossel’s lawyers explain, “The Feedback Defendants contract and work with Facebook to ‘fact-check’ content posted by Facebook users. Facebook commissions the fact-checking and applies content, labels, and other information developed by the fact-checking to the speech of its users.”

Yet we are to believe that the relationship between Facebook and the fact-checkers is merely incidental.

The linguistic gymnastics Facebook uses to hide behind the fact-checkers is breathtaking. Facebook enters into agreements with partisan fact-checking operations like Climate Feedback and relies on their conclusions to determine which content gets seen on its platform and which is either hidden from view or is displayed with warnings like “false” or “partly false.” That Facebook employees are not the ones writing the fact-checks does not absolve the company of guilt when the company wrongly disparages individuals and media outlets with whom they have differences of opinion on complicated policy and scientific debates.

But we’re just trying to make sure people get accurate information, Facebook would have us believe. Yet there are real-world consequences—both financial and in terms of reputation—when a piece of content receives a false rating on the platform. As Facebook admits, “[o]nce a fact-checker rates a piece of information as False, Altered or Partly False, it will appear lower in News Feed, be filtered out of Explore on Instagram, and be featured less prominently in Feed and Stories. This significantly reduces the number of people who see it. We also reject ads with content that has been rated by fact-checkers.”

For Stossel—and for PJ Media as well—such labels result in a loss of revenue when fewer people view the content, and in damage to the reputation of the individual or media outlet that shared the content. It also results in hours upon hours of manpower as our longsuffering social media director attempts to make sense of the fact checks and appeal the decisions—a maddening and often futile process that often come down to the fact-checkers asserting that their experts are better than our experts, so nanny-nanny boo-boo.

One of the main reasons we decided to launch our VIP subscription program is so that we could free ourselves from dependence on left-wing social media platforms like Facebook. Just like any other business, we’ve got bills to pay, employees to compensate, and investments in technology to keep our site online. The more reader-supported we are, the less we’ll have to deal with the headaches and loss of income resulting from baseless fact checks. If you’re not yet a VIP member, please consider supporting what we do here. There are fewer and fewer media outlets that will tell you the truth about climate change, the Wuhan virus, the Biden administration, and the violent, radical Left, to name a few. We promise we’ll continue bringing you honest reporting and commentary, unfiltered by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. Use the promo code BIGTECH for 25% off your subscription. And for a limited time, you can get 30% off a gift subscription—give the gift of truth this year!

Stossel’s lawsuit is an important one—a high-profile veteran journalist is challenging a powerful social media behemoth. Defamation lawsuits are notoriously difficult to win, especially when it’s a media organization that’s being sued. The courts tend to come down on the side of the First Amendment, rightly concluding in most cases that such claims necessarily chill free speech. Facebook claims that they’re not engaging in journalism, that they’re merely running a platform for individual users to post their content. The company cites 230 protections—language in the FCC regulations protecting websites from being sued for content posted by others. The regulations were enacted in the early days of the internet and arguably gave rise to its growth—but they have not been updated since the rise of platforms like Facebook. The fact that the company has given itself broad authority to censor speech it doesn’t like may be enough to convince a judge somewhere that Facebook shouldn’t have such protections and should be treated more like a journalistic outlet—or even a utility company.

Read Facebook’s recent filing:

John Stossel vs. Facebook and Climate Feedback (Filing) by PJ Media on Scribd