FBI Reimbursed Twitter for Providing User Information

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 on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” for instance, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, the new 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