Twitter received a whopping $3.4 million as reimbursement from the FBI for its “staff time.”
In a new controversy, Twitter chief Elon Musk claimed that the U.S. government paid the company ‘millions of dollars’ 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 ‘Twitter Files’ tweets from Michael Shellenberger. “Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public,” Musk said as he retweeted ‘Part 7’ of the Twitter Files.
“Are you willing to make a pledge that Twitter will never accept payment from anyone, government or otherwise, to censor or suppress any information?” a user further asked Musk on the platform. To which he replied, “Absolutely.”
Talking about ‘The Twitter Files’, these are a set of the company’s 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 Biden’s 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 Investigation paid a whopping $3,415,323 to the microblogging site for their ‘staff time’ between October 2019 and February 2021. The screenshots of the email noted that Twitter’s Safety, Content, and Law Enforcement division had instituted a “reimbursement program” in exchange for devoting staff hours to “processing requests from the FBI.”
Referring to emails that claim a plot by the U.S. investigative agency to discredit Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, and as read on a Reuters report, Trump posted on Truth Social that “this would have easily changed the Presidential Election outcome without even discussing all of the illegal things they did.”
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 “someone foolish enough to take the job!” 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.