Back in 2019, Chicago’s mayor Lori Lightfoot suggested she supported the “New World Order” in an interview, which has now resurfaced and gone semi-viral.
While Lightfoot did explicitly state this, Facebook simply refuses to believe so. More precisely, Facebook’s fact-checker seems to think that a real video is somehow “edited” and manipulated, and has marked the video as “false.”
Here’s what Lightfoot originally said in the interview:
“…and you get the people who run those agencies and the deputies that are pledging allegiance to the new world order and good governance.”
And here’s the clip:
And it’s also a phrase that Lightfoot has used in the past:
But Facebook’s fact-checker Associated Press ended up labeling the clip where she spoke about New World Order as false and marked it as “edited”.
In Facebook’s terminology, if a clip is labeled “edited”, it potentially means that the clip is fake as it may be doctored or manipulated to state a false claim. As a result, Facebook cuts the reach of such posts on the platform.
AP said that the video was labeled edited because it was a part of a larger interview where she spoke about a range of things.
(Judging by such a standard then, every clip across Facebook can be considered “edited,” but not every video on Facebook gets suppressed and covered with a “false” fact check.)
AP also asserted that the clip is taken out of context because of the suggestion that Lightfoot is made to seem like she was hinting at a “global coup” by using the term “New World Order.”
But AP said that she was “not planning a global coup, she was talking about ending a long-standing and unusual custom in Chicago called ‘aldermanic prerogative’, which gave aldermen absolute power on zoning and development decisions in their home wards.”
While there has been a negative reception towards the mayor once the clip was shared recently, nowhere did people claim that she was planning a “global coup.” People who are sharing it thought it was an interesting choice of words and even those sharing the video without commentary are having it suppressed on Facebook and covered with a “fact check”.
