It seems that every time I look at a "fact check" for just about anything, what I find is lazy, illogical, half-assed reasoning that isn't even slightly persuasive, based on the fact checker's subjective interpretation of whether or not the opinion being expressed in the thing being "checked" is good or bad.
In this case, they acknowledge that the literal claim is true - that the box of masks in the photo explicitly warns that it does not protect against covid. But then they respond to a strawman (ie. not the claim being made in the OP) and explain that the mask isn't to protect the wearer but to protect other people from the wearer, even if that individual is not symptomatic.
Their primary source for this?
An op-ed some guy wrote in May of 2020 advocating mask mandates discussing a preprint of a metastudy about mask effectiveness (of which I guarantee you all the papers they reviewed studied n95s or better in clinical settings).
PolitiFact's other sources? More op-eds and other "fact checks" from places like Snopes.
They couldn't even be bothered to marshal credible data from peer reviewed studies or journals and present primary sources directly. It's just false cause this guy's opinion article says so.
We are eventually going to look back on entities like PolitiFact and realize how much damage they've done to people's intelligence and ability to reason.
I call it (in order not to be censored) #intellectualselfpleasure
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