ANALYSIS: TRUE. Liberal fact-checkers are not the way to ensure a more informed public.

That’s certainly the case with PolitiFact, which pretends to be even-handed but has its own biases. In 2008 PolitiFact helped bless ObamaCare with a “true” rating for candidate Barack Obama’s claim that “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.” In 2009 the website demoted the remark to “half true,” adding the non-insight that ObamaCare would “surely change the current health system.” By 2013, as Americans lost their insurance, PolitiFact changed its judgment and called Mr. Obama’s line the “lie of the year.”

Tendentious PolitiFact ratings are a classic genre of bad journalism. When Texas libertarian Ron Paul said the U.S. federal income-tax rate was zero until 1913, PolitiFact called that “half true.” (We would have called that true.) Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb later said the same thing and notched a mark of “mostly true,” and maybe he earned extra points for being a Democrat.

Behind this is the conceit that political debates could be settled if ideologues (Republicans) would only accept what the liberal consensus defines as “facts,” as if worldview or interpretation are irrelevant. Facebook has long insisted that it is neutral about content, and earlier this year it denied reports that the platform censored conservative news. That’s looking less credible.

The company also says it will only target the “worst of the worst” fake news, which you would think a sophisticated algorithm could identify without an assist from PolitiFact. In any case, the standard is subjective and no one knows which employees will make that call.

All that’s needed to combat “fake news” is transparency and honesty. Facebook lacks the former and the press lacks the latter.

Getting those two into bed together isn’t going to produce any viable offspring.