Kellyanne Conway Calls out Social Media Companies Against Donald Trump as ‘Election Interference’

Amid the news of Donald Trump issuing an executive order to ban U.S. interaction with China, TikTok and WeChat in the next 45 days to step up efforts in purging “untrusted” Chinese apps, Kellyanne Conway is now calling out social media for “election interference.” The counselor took to Fox News, accusing mega networks like Facebook and Twitter — both of which blocked coronavirus misinformation posted by Trump — of taking part in “selective engagement.”

“Why do we have the Big Tech overlords telling us what is and is not legitimate on health matters?” Conway told Fox News program, America’s Newsroom on Thursday. “Twitter, Facebook, many of the forums are already overly anti-Trump. I think what’s happened is that the president has over 200 million followers on all of his social media platforms, he has used it in a way no other politician has used it… [and] they don’t like that.”

Conway went on to allege how there was a political motivation behind the bans by both Facebook and Twitter. “I think what many of these tech companies are doing now to the president, to conservatives, the shadow banning, the censoring, the selective engagement, is election interference,” she said.

The counselor went on to criticize the World Health Organization, a United Nations agency qualified in the public health sector working closely with researchers and doctors, that they continue to post on social media despite publicly stating there was no evidence of human to human transmission of the coronavirus.

“We got three years worth of election security, now we’re going to do mail-in balloting, we’re going to shut down the president’s Twitter feed, at times Team Trump got shut down, yet [content about] the Ayatollah Khamenei is up,” she said. “The biggest lie of the last 10 years, said by Joe Biden, ‘You can keep your plan, keep your doctor. That’s probably in a tweet somewhere.”

On Wednesday, Twitter and Facebook blocked video shared by accounts linked to the president for violating their policies on coronavirus misinformation. Trump’s re-election campaign, @TeamTrump was briefly banned from sending any new tweets after it posted a video alleging children were “virtually immune” from the coronavirus. His administration went on to post the same video to Facebook, where it was removed shortly before Twitter’s actions.

The comments from Conway come fresh off the heels of Facebook spokesperson, Liz Bourgeois issuing a statement over the Trump blocks, revealing the former reality TV star posted content that included “false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19, which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation.”

While the social network has worked hard to keep the facts straight amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the CEO Mark Zuckerberg has faced heightened scrutiny to crack down on misinformation following the 2016 election, with a lengthy roster of companies threatening to pull advertising.