Brandy Zadrozny’s appearance on Friday’s The 11th Hour on MSNBC with host Stephanie Ruhle raised the question of whether or not the duo read the same Twitter thread as everybody else, because Zadrozny claimed Matt Taibbi’s thread detailing how Twitter suppressed the New York Post article on Hunter Biden’s laptop actually makes Twitter look good. …

it was really helpful thing, actually, the Twitter files today, we got to see how content moderation works. We got to see how when a group of people with different political ideas and ideologies and views, gets together in the spirit of making a platform safe and healthy, right before an election, right when we knew we had just learned of the hack and leaks and Wikileaks and all the stuff that that did to hurt and to affect the 2020–the 2016 election. In 2020, they were heightened. People were trying to do the right thing and inside Twitter.

In the actual thread, Taibbi does concede that content removal requests were available to both sides, but in practice, Democrats had a better chance of success because Twitter is a ultra-liberal company. The idea that there were conservatives inside Twitter who agreed to suppress the Post article is not anywhere in Taibbi’s thread.

What is in the thread is people struggling to accept the hack explanation, but not be willing to do anything about it. Taibbi also reports the extraordinary measure of resorting to suppression, noting that such methods were usually reserved for things such as child pornography.

Yet, Zadrozny still claimed, “it looked like, this weird story of a laptop left in some, like, repair shop, it looked like a hack and leak. That’s what people inside Twitter thought it was. And so, they acted a little fast.”

[I’m sure it did look good to MSNBC. They were getting exactly what they wanted from previous Twitter management — suppression of dissenting views and voices. — Ed]