McSally Rips Big Tech Hypocrisy: Letting Trump Misinformation Spread 'Like Wildfire'
On Thursday’s episode of The Western Journal’s podcast, “WJ Live,” Republican Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona blasted Big Tech companies for attempting to “influence” the 2020 election.
Twitter and Facebook made headlines over the past few weeks for censoring a New York Post report in which the paper claimed to have obtained emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
At least one email published in the story appears to show that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to an executive from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma shortly before the controversial firing of a prosecutor who had opened an investigation into the firm.
The Western Journal’s editor-in-chief, George Upper, asked McSally if she thought Twitter and Facebook had gone too far in suppressing the report and if Congress was going to do anything about it.
McSally did not hold back in her response.
“Well, they’ve absolutely gone too far. I’ve always been deeply concerned about Big Tech. I’m concerned about big government, but concerned even more about Big Tech,” McSally responded on “WJ Live.”
“And we saw it on display with their censorship this week.”
McSally then confirmed that Facebook and Twitter’s CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, would be appearing before the Commerce Committee in the Senate next week.
The two men have also been subpoenaed to appear before the Judiciary Committee.
“People wanted to see social media as a highway where you could just exchange ideas and you could pass information, you could find your old high school classmates. And they had protections that were unique to that role so that they wouldn’t be treated like a newspaper who could be sued,” McSally explained.
“But they’re clearly showing that they’re putting their thumb on the scale. I mean, we’ve seen this and we’ve known this for a while, but this is a very blatant example. I mean, they don’t they don’t censor any of the stories that come out about President Trump or conservatives that are often not sourced at all.”
One such example of a story about Trump that was “not sourced at all” was a September article in The Atlantic alleging that the president called Americans who died in war “losers” and “suckers.”
Although The Atlantic’s story was based completely on anonymous sources, 21 on-the-record sources, including former National Security Advisor John Bolton, denied that Trump made the comments, as the Washington Examiner reported.
McSally then posited that this one-sided bias was clear evidence that Big Tech companies are trying to influence the 2020 election.
“They just let them go like wildfire. So they showed that they are trying to influence this election. I think this is election interference and they need to be held accountable now. The Section 230 protections that they have, I don’t think they deserve them anymore,” McSally continued.
“Hopefully there’s entrepreneurs out there where people can have a platform to exchange ideas and not see this type of censorship happen. But they can’t have it both ways. You know, if it goes down that road where we take away their 230 protections, then they can put their thumb on the scale even more while people are still trying to use it as a highway of ideas.”
“So hopefully there’s some disruption. There were other innovations that will happen where we can truly have a place where information can be exchanged and we don’t have conservatives who continue to be censored.”
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