A shocking revelation surfaced in December that the Federal Bureau of Investigation allegedly paid Twitter $3.4 million of taxpayer money to ban or suspend accounts on its platform.
The FBI reportedly targeted so-called “foreign influence” operations on Twitter, as well as accounts espousing conservative viewpoints.
As the so-called “Twitter Files” continue to be released by Elon Musk, offering a view of the inner workings of one of the world’s most important social media companies, new information has come to light about the influence wielded by the FBI on content and information.
Records indicate that as the FBI demanded more and more of Twitter staff’s time to suspend or ban accounts it targeted, the company developed a “reimbursement program” to process the federal agency’s requests.
In a February 2021 email, an as-yet-unidentified Twitter employee emailed the company’s then-general counsel Sean Edgett and then-deputy general counsel Jim Baker and gleefully announced, “We have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019” from the reimbursement program.
Interestingly, while the program had existed prior to October 2019, the records indicate that Twitter had not exercised its right to seek reimbursement until then.
In the latest release of internal Twitter documents by Musk, the depth of the FBI’s apparent manipulation of the platform was made plain.
For example, on November 3, 2020, the day of the national general elections, in an internal company chat, one employee asked, “Anyone need help reviewing the tweets forwarded in *FBI Report on Possible Violative Content?*”
After securing a volunteer, another employee wrote, “Thank you all so much for your help. A monumental undertaking!”
Weeks after the national general election, Edgett and Baker apparently received an email from another Twitter employee touting how the social media company “was on the front line of protecting our users (and the public at large) from misinformation/disinformation campaigns that had the potential to negatively affect the fair election process.”
The employee reportedly went on to lament that Twitter would never get public credit for helping the FBI track “violent actors” who wanted to perpetrate “acts of domestic terrorism” at polling locations.
“We had an unprecedented national security and law enforcement response that was the result of a tight, well-coordinated partnership with the FBI that was based on trust,” the employee touted.
The employee then asked if Edgett and Baker would sign a letter of thanks for the FBI’s “willingness to partner on matters of election integrity and public safety.”
Both Edgett and Baker reportedly responded affirmatively.
“We should be mindful that the letters could leak and will be subject to [Freedom of Information Act], so we should prepare them with that expectation in mind,” Baker replied.