> Imagine what the government of Mississippi or Indiana during the Jim Crow era would label as blatant misinformation.

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.

>But we're not talking about the government, we're talking about private platforms. Others are allowed to spread misinfo if they so choose.

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.

That's irrelevant: it's still not the government doing the banning, other platforms could use different heuristics or just not have those moderation policies at all.

> 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.

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.