By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-09-28 21:26:52 | Updated at 2026-09-29 01:18:18
4 hours ago
A Twitter logo is displayed outside the company's offices in San Francisco on Dec. 19, 2022. Jeff Chiu/AP Photo
A civil rights legal organization is escalating its demands for the FBI to release records regarding payments to social media companies in connection with an alleged government censorship campaign under the Biden administration.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) petitioned the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Sept. 24, seeking enforcement of its 2003 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FBI to release records regarding alleged payments to Twitter (now X) and other tech, media, and nongovernmental organizations.
The NCLA claims that the FBI is “stonewalling” their inquiry in violation of FOIA provisions.
“Apparently, the FBI’s concern that federal law be obeyed does not extend to itself and its obligations under FOIA,” NCLA litigation counsel Casey Norman told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
According to the court filing, the FBI has claimed a FOIA exemption, stating that, among other things, releasing records would reveal law enforcement techniques and that it could neither confirm nor deny whether any such records even existed.
The case regards allegations in journalist Michael Shellenberger’s “Twitter Files,” referencing Twitter internal emails, that the FBI paid approximately $3.4 million to Twitter and that these payments may have been connected with censorship requests or demands by the Biden administration.
“We already know from the public record that FBI officials met regularly with social-media companies and flagged particular content and accounts for censorship,” Norman said. “Yet when NCLA sought to determine whether FBI used taxpayer funds in connection with requests beyond compulsory legal process—including requests to suppress disfavored content or viewpoints—the Bureau refused to conduct a search and insists that merely acknowledging whether any such records even exist would expose secret law-enforcement techniques and help wrong-doers evade the law.
“We largely suspect that the FBI paid Twitter and other comparable platforms for complying with the agency’s requests concerning their content moderation policies, i.e. the pressure campaign and censorship of politically disfavored content and viewpoints revealed via the preliminary discovery in Missouri v. Biden,” Norman said.
Missouri v. Biden, subsequently Murthy v. Missouri, was a lawsuit brought by Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general, charging that the Biden administration had actively coerced social media companies to suppress constitutionally protected speech that countered government narratives during the COVID pandemic. In 2024, the Supreme Court stated that the plaintiffs lacked standing, without ruling on the merits of the allegations, reversing a previous lower court ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.
The FBI has released a number of documents in response to NCLA’s FOIA request, but NCLA’s court filing states that the “FBI’s belated production of 51 heavily redacted pages does not cure its FOIA violations and instead introduces additional problems.” These pages contain “little beyond dates,” the NCLA charged.
In February 2026, a federal district court decision concerning a similar FOIA request from Judicial Watch, a non-profit public interest watchdog, characterized the FBI’s payments as reimbursement for subpoenas, warrants, and other requests for information from Twitter, rather than payments for “content moderation.”
The Epoch Times contacted the FBI regarding this court filing, but the bureau declined to comment.
