The FBI Paid Twitter $3.4 Million for Processing Requests

The FBI paid Twitter millions of dollars to cover the costs of processing the agency's requests. "I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!" wrote someone with Twitter's Safety, Content, & Law Enforcement (SCALE) team in a February 2021 email, according to internal messages reported by journalist Michael Shellenberger today.

"In 2019 SCALE instituted a reimbursement program for our legal process response from the FBI," explained the email, whose author is redacted. "Prior to the start of the program, Twitter chose not to collect under this statutory right of reimbursement for the time spent processing requests from the FBI."

The internal email was reported as part of an ongoing project known as the Twitter Files, in which new Twitter CEO Elon Musk gave a small group of journalists access to a trove of internal communications and documents on the condition that stories derived from this material be reported on Twitter first. Reason's Robby Soave has written about previous installments of the Twitter Files here, here, here, and here.

Shellenberger's new installment centers on Twitter's decision to temporarily block a New York Post story about Hunter Biden just before the 2020 election. This was also the subject of the first Twitter Files thread, from Matt Taibbi.