Twitter received a whopping $3.4 million as reimbursement from the FBI for its āstaff time.āĀ
In a new controversy, Twitter chief Elon Musk claimed that the U.S. government paid the company āmillions of dollarsā to censor information from the public. He also pledged on the microblogging platform to never accept payments from the government that would force him to block information.
In typical Musk fashion, the billionaire made the accusation by replying to a series of infamous and controversial āTwitter Filesā tweets from Michael Shellenberger. āGovernment paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public,ā MuskĀ saidĀ as he retweeted āPart 7ā of the Twitter Files.
āAre you willing to make a pledge that Twitter will never accept payment from anyone, government or otherwise, to censor or suppress any information?ā a user further asked Musk on the platform. To which he replied, āAbsolutely.ā
Talking about āThe Twitter Filesā, these are a set of the companyās internal documents shared by Musk exposing some internal deliberations over how some of the senior executives of the company blocked a media report covering Hunter Bidenās international business operations and blacklisted former President Donald Trump after Capitol Hill riots.
In the seventh tranche of internal communication between the Twitter employees, Shellenberger posted that the Federal Bureau of InvestigationĀ paid a whopping $3,415,323 to the microblogging site for their āstaff timeā between October 2019 and February 2021. The screenshots of the email noted that Twitterās Safety, Content, and Law Enforcement division had instituted a āreimbursement programā in exchange for devoting staff hours to āprocessing requests from the FBI.ā
Referring to emails that claim a plot by the U.S. investigative agency to discredit Hunter Bidenās foreign business dealings, and as read on a ReutersĀ report, Trump posted on Truth Social that āthis would have easily changed the Presidential Election outcome without even discussing all of the illegal things they did.ā
The former U.S. President was banned from the platform after he was accused of inciting the Capitol Hill riots in January 2021. He said he would stick with Truth Social, an app developed by his startup, after Musk reinstated his Twitter account last month.
Under the leadership of the new boss Elon Musk, the microblogging platform is constantly in the news because of what now seems like a never-ending saga consisting of mass layoffs, weakening content moderation policies, and a surge in fake accounts. In the latest development, Musk said to resign as Twitter CEO as soon as he finds āsomeone foolish enough to take the job!ā His decision came after a majority of users voted in favor of him stepping down from the post of chief executive officer in a poll conducted by Musk himself on the social media platform.