This article is using "liberals" to refer to members of the political left in America:

>The urge to “deplatform” made liberals seem weak, insofar as it implied less than total confidence in their ability to prevail on the merits. The conservative account was all about allegiance and power, but at least it didn’t really pretend otherwise.

>The decision alludes to her conflicted relationship to a clutch of attitudes that are often coded as right-wing. Like many Silicon Valley intellectuals, she thinks that figures like the voguish neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin—whose more objectionable statements she explicitly rejects—and Peter Thiel had long demonstrated a better grasp of online behavior than liberals did.