A former Facebook Security Executive has called Elon Musk’s claims about the FBI paying Twitter to moderate content on the site “false.”
Alex Stamos’ comment comes after journalist Michael Shellenberger shared a redacted screenshot of a 2021 email showing Twitter had collected over $3.4 million from a reimbursement program for time spent processing FBI requests.
The screenshot was part of the latest batch of “Twitter Files”, which Elon Musk said was proof that the “Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public.”
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In a Mastodon thread, Stamos, who left Facebook in 2018 to lecture at Stanford, explained that “law enforcement has the ability to get stored communications from companies like Twitter under 18 USC 2703(d). This is a famous ‘d-order’ that has to be signed by a judge.”
He added that companies “can demand reimbursement” for the requests, which is what Twitter did, though prior to 2019, as shown by the email screenshot, the company chose not to.
The law states that if a governmental entity such as the FBI is legally requesting information for an investigation, companies receiving such requests can be reimbursed for processing them. The reimbursement covers “costs as are reasonably necessary and which have been directly incurred in searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing” the requested information.
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