Twitter wades into controversy with fact-check label for Trump tweet
President Trump attacks social media outlet over alleged bias; reaction and analysis from with FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr and John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general.
"The View" co-host Meghan McCain argued on Thursday that both President Trump and Twitter were "virtue signaling" and engaging in "kabuki theater" to appease their respective bases.
"I think all of this is kabuki theater on the parts of the tech companies and on President Trump," she said, "and I think they’re all virtue signaling to each other’s bases and audiences, and I think this is a complete waste of time especially with 100,000 deaths [from coronavirus in the U.S.] right now."
Her comments came after Trump castigated Twitter for including a fact-check below two of his tweets about mail-in voting Tuesday.
McCain also suggested that the social media giant was going down a ridiculous path of fact-checking individual posts.
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"The idea that [Twitter CEO] Jack Dorsey is neutral or an unbiased person in all of this just isn't rational," she said. "And that's fine. Every CEO of every private company is free to have whatever political beliefs they want and believe, and he has publicly given donations to people like Tulsi Gabbard. I believe he’s a proud progressive, and that’s great.
"I think part of the problem here is I don’t understand what anyone’s talking about. So the president wants to censor a public platform where he has 80 million followers, and Twitter wants to start fact-checking tweets. Now, if we’re going to go down this road, every journalist, every commentator, every teenager who says that they can run, you know whatever, 100 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."
Trump has warned that he would regulate or shut social media platforms down if they continue to show what he described as bias against conservatives.
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Tech giants “silence conservative voices,” the president claimed on Twitter early Wednesday. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.” Later, also on Twitter, he threatened, “Big Action to follow.” And in one more late-night tweet, he said "Big Tech” was “going absolutely CRAZY. Stay Tuned!!!”
Fox News has confirmed that the administration is crafting an executive order that would aim to weaken legal protections that shield social media companies from liability.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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