Meghan McCain accused President Trump of engaging in a “wag the dog” tactic by restarting the claims of conservative censorship on social media to distract from the coronavirus.
President Trump, who has frequently brought up claims of censorship on social media, did so again on Wednesday, a day after Twitter used a fact-check warning on one of his posts. But McCain argued that his outrage was really a way to divert attention from the approximately 100,000 people in the United States who have died during the pandemic.
“There’s a lot of checks and balances, but at the same time, all the women on here are proponents and advocates of free speech, so I think it’s a very slippery slope, unfortunately. But the president knows what he’s doing, as Joy [Behar] rightly pointed out at the beginning of this, and it’s very wag the dog-esque for him to be going after this instead of focusing, as Joy said, on the 100,000 lives that have been lost in the past three months,” McCain said on The View after Trump’s complaints.
McCain also said that she never had “anyone try and shut any of my social media posts down” but added that she felt like Twitter would have responded faster when an “incredibly violent” tweet was posted about her if “I were liberal or if I were the daughter of a liberal politician.”
Trump restarted the debate on social media censorship after Twitter placed the label on the president’s tweets for the first time Tuesday when he tweeted about mail-in voting in California. The warning linked to a page with tweets and articles discussing the issue. The platform introduced the fact-checking policy as a way to reduce the spread of misinformation on the platform.
“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016,” the president tweeted Wednesday morning.
“We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!” he continued, before adding that “big action” will come.
