Meghan McCain railed against allowing young children access to social media during Tuesday’s broadcast of “The View.”
McCain noted that she had done things when she was younger that she might be embarrassed to have documented on social media, and that especially in the age of cancel culture, that could be “dangerous” for a lot of young people. (RELATED: ‘Let’s Cut The Crap’: Meghan McCain Flames Republicans For Continued Devotion To ‘Cheeto Jesus’)
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Whoopi Goldberg began by asking McCain whether adults’ attachment to social media might be a part of the reluctance to really crack down on access for younger children.
“Are you surprised that there doesn’t seem to be a huge outcry of people saying, ‘If you don’t fix this, we’re getting off social media?'” she asked. “I mean, isn’t that part of the problem that parents don’t want to give it up either? They don’t want anyone stopping them. What do you think?”
“Yeah. It’s a real catch-22,” McCain replied, noting that while there were certainly things that concerned her, she would classify herself as “addicted to social media.”
“Facebook started when I was in college, and I remember when it first came out everyone was so excited, and the way it connected college students and obviously we know where it went from there,” McCain continued. “There’s a woman who was just fired from being the head editor of Teen Vogue from a tweet she sent in high school. You want to talk about cancel culture, let’s get kids tweeting and Instagramming. Nobody will have a future.”
“Thank God there wasn’t a Twitter or Instagram,” McCain added, suggesting that she might have posted things at a younger age that would have later proved embarrassing. “I was really stupid. I didn’t say anything like that editor did, but I definitely got into trouble and partied and did things I would be embarrassed about now, and it’s bad enough that I have a record starting, you know, when I was 20, let alone when you are 8. So I think it’s a bad idea all the way around. And dangerous.”
Facebook recently announced plans to go forward with an Instagram platform for kids under the age of 13.