Meghan McCain Slams Twitter For Fact Checking Donald Trump
Meghan McCain slammed Twitter’s decision to fact-check Donald Trump’s tweets on Thursday’s episode of The View, arguing that if the social media site checks the president’s messages, it will be forced to monitor every message posted to its platform.
As The Daily Beast reports, McCain and her fellow co-hosts were chatting about Trump’s ongoing war with social media sites, particularly Twitter, after the site put a warning mark on two of his tweets this week. Today, the president is expected to announce an executive order aimed at addressing social media platforms, forcing the topic into the forefront of the conversation both generally and on the show.
But while Whoopi Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, and Joy Behar all said that they think Twitter should be allowed to link to factual information when the president posts something that could contain false details, McCain strongly disagreed with this point. She said that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is biased and not neutral in the matter, calling him a “proud progressive.”
“So the president wants to censor a public platform where he has 80 million followers. And Twitter wants to start fact-checking tweets,” she said. “Now if we’re going to go down this road, every journalist, every commentator, every teenager who says they can run a hundred miles in two minutes is going to be fact-checked. That’s not logical.”
“You might as well shut down the platform in its entirety,” McCain added. “I think all of this is Kabuki theater on the parts of the tech companies and on President Trump. And I think they’re all virtue signaling to each other’s bases and audiences.”
She added that she thought the entire matter was a distraction, given the impact that the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to have on the lives of people in the United States.
Goldberg responded that she was happy that the tech company decided to fact check Trump’s tweets, given the reach and import of his messages. She added that fact-checking teenagers who exaggerate their accomplishments aren’t as important to police, but the president’s messages, which could impact the way the country functions, are worth correcting.
Trump has called out Twitter for what he believes is censorship of his and others’ posts in recent days. The media site has become a popular target for both people on the right and the left, who respectively argue that it either polices users too much or not enough.
