This is also dangerous. Imagine what the government of Mississippi or Indiana during the Jim Crow era would label as blatant misinformation.
Also, in a recent court case, Facebook admitted their fact checking was opinion and therefore protected from defamation. So to put those together, Facebook is censoring because of their opinion disagrees with the opinion of the censored.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/13/facebook-bizarrely-claims-its-...
But we're not talking about the government, we're talking about private platforms. Others are allowed to spread misinfo if they so choose.
> Also, in a recent court case, Facebook admitted their fact checking was opinion and therefore protected from defamation. So to put those together, Facebook is censoring because of their opinion disagrees with the opinion of the censored.
Fact checking is an attempt at objectivity that is nevertheless partially subjective, but that doesn't mean it's not better than doing nothing. You wouldn't improve the New York Times or Wall Street Journal by dragging them down to the level of the National Enquirer.
Yes, but we are. A lot of the COVID misinformation isn't declared misinformation because the fact-checker isn't an expert at COVID, it's because they are cross checking it with what the government says (CDC/NIH/etc). So the fact checker is using the government's facts, so imagine if they used the government's facts on race during the Jim Crow era.
>Fact checking is an attempt at objectivity that is nevertheless partially subjective, but that doesn't mean it's not better than doing nothing.
Depends on who is doing the fact checking. To continue with the prior hypothetical, what if someone stated in 2003 that there weren't WMD's in Iraq. The fact checkers would check with the government's facts who states there were WMD's in Iraq. The fact checker (not an expert on WMDs) would possibly label that as misinformation. In this example, it would be better to have done nothing.
In the situation where the facts are whatever the government says, that's not fact-checking or journalism at all, that's just being a mouthpiece to power.
I don't remember the government providing any real evidence of this though, whereas for, say, the COVID vaccines, they've each had different medical trial phases, followed by data on the general populace once they reached widespread deployment. Those are very different situations.
You're right that of course there's nothing that absolutely guarantees that fact checking is better than no fact checking 100% of the time. Just like, say, a white supremacist forum's idea of 'moderation' may be worse than no moderation at all. I should amend my point: moderation and fact checking are potentially better than doing nothing, and in the case of the major platforms, definitely are.
It's not a strawman, as many people assert that platforms should just let anything not-illegal stay up. You may not believe this, but there are others who I've seen assert it.
> Facebook and Twitter ban for political reasons, which is entirely different than banning spam.
It's not the same, but the issue is that once you're past the border of "we'll only ban illegal stuff", you're now in the realm of much more subjective decisionmaking. In practice, many forms of speech could be classified as both political, and harassment/bullying/other bad stuff, which is what usually happens with Facebook.
In their case, they don't want to get into the political sphere, but they do want to bad blatant misinformation, and in practice that does overlap with politics.