House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to ban an account that referred to the first lady as a “hoebag” this week. And McCarthy is wrong to do so.
On Monday, a little known congressional candidate running as an independent in Oregon tweeted, “Did you know the First Lady works by the hour? #thinkdirty #hoebag”
McCarthy flagged the tweet for Dorsey, replying, “@jack this attack on @FLOTUS is disgraceful. Comments like these have no business on any platform. This account should be banned ASAP.”
.@jack this attack on @FLOTUS is disgraceful. Comments like these have no business on any platform. This account should be banned ASAP. https://t.co/sIGO4ggeAM
— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) July 31, 2018
He’s right about the comment being disgraceful, and he’s right that ideally there’s no place for cheap slander on any platform. But he’s wrong to suggest Twitter ban accounts that engage in it.
If fringe candidates think it’s appropriate to call the first lady a “hoebag,” voters are better off for knowing that. Twitter is a private platform, and there are (few) necessary limits to the First Amendment. But sunlight is the best disinfectant, and bad tweets give us the opportunity to send good ones. That’s how dialogue works, messy and uncomfortable as it may be. More speech is better than less.
That’s a principle conservatives defend fiercely on college campuses, whether an institution is public or private (like Twitter). Twitter’s ostensible double standard for conservative and liberal speech may have been what was really on McCarthy’s mind. But that’s not a good enough reason for Republican lawmakers to seek bans. True as it is that Twitter has devolved into a pit of juvenile barb trading, conservatives can’t allow the proliferation of noxious anti-Trump vitriol to push them away from supporting the right approach to free speech.
