“We’ve looked at the top social media companies. Twitter always ends up being the worst of the bunch,” MRC Vice President of Business and Culture Dan Gainor said on Trish Regan Primetime on Fox Business on March 19.
Regan asked Gainor about Rep. Devin Nunes’ (R-CA) lawsuit against Twitter. She also pointed out that the attacks against conservatives online were intensifying, as President Trump’s aide Dan Scavino was blocked from his Facebook page.
Gainor answered, “All these problems, all this fixation on social media, the investigation, complaining about Russia buying all of $100,000 worth of ads on social media or whatever, all this stems from the fact that Obama won in 2012 on the backs of a successful social media operation. Donald Trump won in 2016 on the backs of his successful social media operation including being the most dominant influencer on Twitter. And they can’t stand it.”
Regan brought up Nunes’ lawsuit, saying that the social media companies were allowing his name to be smeared. She said, “This is Devin Nunes’ point, that they were just trying to attack him really in a libeled style.”
Gainor said that Nunes’ lawsuit was “bringing attention to the problem.” He then referenced a study released by the Media Research Center tallying the number of conservatives who had been censored, banned or suspended on Twitter: “We did a quick tally of just conservative influencers or people who are willing to sort of fight the Twitter power. We tallied 113 fairly prominent people who have been restricted in some way on Twitter. We did that a few weeks ago, and I know the number would be a lot higher now. This is an ongoing problem.”
Regan asked if the government needed to intervene. Gainor said no: “Getting government involved, all you’re going to end up with most likely instead of several hate speech policies that are all bad individually, you end up with one policy that’s far worse.”
