Meghan McCain slams Jack Dorsey and Twitter: Doctored gun photo made father's death 'exponentially more painful'
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Meghan McCain is still waiting for that apology from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about a doctored image of a gun being held to her head that went viral on Twitter during her father’s memorial.
The subject was raised on Thursday’s episode of The View, when the panel discussed Twitter’s decision not to suspend the account of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan for his tweet comparing Jews to insects. Farrakhan, who has posted anti-Semitic messages before, is not in violation of any extant policy, according to the company. While it appears to violate Twitter’s proposed new policy around “dehumanizing” tweets, that rule has not yet gone into effect.
Meghan McCain weighed in, noting that the accounts of James Woods, Candace Owens, and Milo Yiannopoulos have all been suspended before.
“My problem is, I had an experience after my father died when I was still at his funeral, where a picture went viral of someone who had put a picture of me crying over my father’s casket with, with a Glock pointed at my head, and it went viral,” she recalled. “It was up all day. The only reason it was taken down was because my husband went absolutely ape-crap, got involved, called people he knew who worked in Congress to get involved.”
In September, Dorsey told Congress he agreed it was “unacceptable” and said the digitally altered image should have been taken down earlier. Dorsey said he would personally apologize to McCain, who shared on Thursday that the image only added “more pain” during the “worst time” of her life — after the death of her father, John McCain.
“He has not [apologized], by the way,” McCain noted. “Technology has real ramifications, it made that experience exponentially more painful. Now, I have a husband who knows congresspeople, my father was a sitting senator, so it got taken down at some point. What if you are somebody who lives in Ohio, who has something like this doctored, who doesn’t have this kind of access? They have to do better.”
She added, “When you’re talking about free speech, there are limitations. You can’t have child porn on the internet. We still live in a civilized society, you can’t have death threats against people after their father dies and keep it up.”
Co-host Abby Huntsman, who revealed that she deals with death threats against herself and her children on Twitter, said she recently had coffee with Dorsey.
“I think he’s in over his head,” Huntsman said. “He understands there’s a problem. … They’ve got a lot of challenges ahead. The problem is, where do you draw that line on free speech? I would say if you’re sexist, if you’re racist, if you’re threatening someone’s life — is that not enough?”
Dorsey tackled the hot-button issue of free speech on Twitter at Wired’s 25th anniversary summit this week.
“When we started the company, we weren’t thinking about this at all. We were thinking about building something that we wanted to use,” he explained. “Our purpose today, we believe, our superpower, is around conversation. And we believe our purpose is to serve the public conversation. And that does take a stance around freedom of expression and defending freedom of expression as a fundamental human right. Not just one within this country.”
He added, “But it also comes with a realization that freedom of expression may adversely impact other fundamental human rights, such as privacy and physical security. So we believe that we can only serve the public conversation, we can only stand for freedom of expression if people feel safe to express themselves in the first place. We can only do that if they feel that they are not being silenced.”
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