Liberal Forum

In an email to a Twitter lawyer in February 2021, an unidentified Twitter employee wrote that the company had received over $3.4 million from the FBI since October 2019 as reimbursement for Twitter’s processing of legal requests for user information.

Federal law allows companies to seek compensation for complying with government requests for stored records.

That is not evidence that the FBI paid Twitter to “censor” or “suppress” content on the social media platform, as several conservative figures and politicians have claimed or suggested since the email was made public in December.

In a Jan. 29 appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” for instance, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the House would be investigating “threats to the First Amendment,” like “the idea that the FBI was paying Twitter $3.4 million to help them suppress information.”

Jordan made a similar assertion in a Dec. 20 tweet, in which he quoted from a New York Post tweet that said the “FBI paid Twitter back more than $3M for doing its dirty work on users, email shows.”

In its Dec. 19 story, the Post alleged that the “FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million of taxpayer cash to ban accounts largely linked to conservative voices and target so-called ‘foreign influence’ operations."

That is not the case, according to the FBI, which told FactCheck.org it only reimbursed Twitter for “searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing” information that the agency needed for legal reasons.

Even on separate occasions when the FBI contacted Twitter to report user accounts that may have violated Twitter’s terms of service rules, the agency has said “we never direct or ask them to take action.”

Experts in cybersecurity and electronic communications also have said that the nearly two-year-old email message does not mean that the FBI paid Twitter millions of dollars to block certain users or limit public access to specific posts.

https://www.factcheck.org/2023/02/fbi-r ... formation/