Mehdi Hasan and Matt Taibbi Throw Down Over Twitter Files: ‘Would You Like to Criticize Musk Now?’

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan battled journalist Matt Taibbi about his involvement in the release of the Twitter Files after the latter requested to be on the show, and things got more than a little awkward between the two.

Taibbi has recently released a series of internal documents from Twitter that allegedly show the company’s previous team was censoring certain political views. Hasan has been a number of critics of Twitter’s new head Elon Musk and Taibbi’s Twitter Files revelations.

Last month, Taibbi tweeted that Hasan should have him on his show in response to the MSNBC host tweeting about a report on Twitter blocking accounts in India at the request of the government.

“I’m sure Taibbi is all over this,” Hasan said.

In previews of their interview, Taibbi and Hasan discuss that very story, but the two are working on different pages.

Hasan pushed Taibbi to discuss the actual Indian government story, but Taibbi said he was unaware of the details.

“You’re saying [Musk’s] good for Twitter and he’s good for speech. I’m saying he’s using Twitter to help one of the most right-wing governments in the world censor speech. I will criticize that. Will you?” Hasan asked, pulling up the tweet exchange between the two.

“I have to look at the story first and I’m not looking at it now,” Taibbi said, later claiming he also doesn’t watch The Mehdi Hasan Show, something his host could not buy.

“Actually you do because you tweeted at me saying, ‘invite me on the show and I’ll tell you my views.’ Here you are,” Hasan said.

Taibbi argued Hasan was saying the Twitter Files stories were not worth it when they suggest clear bias at a major social media platform.

“You’re arguing that this information was not in the public interest, that I somehow shouldn’t have done this story that I worked hard on because Elon Musk tweeted something?” he said.

In another exchange, Hasan accused Taibbi of a series of errors in one Twitter Files report, to which Taibbi acknowledged one. He took to Twitter ahead of his full interview airing to state his grievances with MSNBC, calling out the network itself.

“The last time I was on MSNBC before today’ with @mehdirhasan was just before the inauguration of @realDonaldTrump, when I made the mistake of saying, ‘We don’t have any hard evidence’ that there was a conspiracy with Russia.” I was never invited back,” Taibbi tweeted.

Watch above via MSNBC.

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