The New Civil Liberties Alliance wants to know whether the FBI spent tax dollars getting platforms to bury Americans’ speech. On June 30 it asked a federal judge to force an answer.
NCLA filed a motion for summary judgment in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the latest move in its case against the FBI and the Justice Department.
We obtained a copy of the motion for you here.
The request itself is narrow, covering records responsive to a FOIA filing NCLA made in January 2023 about money the Bureau reportedly routed to social media companies, media outlets, and other private groups.
Beyond the paperwork are the questions the FBI won’t touch. Did it pay platforms to honor its takedown requests? Did it pay them to rewrite moderation rules or retune algorithms so that what people saw lined up with what the government wanted them to see?
Nobody outside the Bureau knows because the FBI decided nobody should. It didn’t search for a single document or redact a line. It rejected the request wholesale and reached for a FOIA exemption built for records “compiled for law enforcement purposes” that would expose investigative techniques and help someone evade the law.
On that footing, it claimed it could neither confirm nor deny that any responsive records exist at all.
That claim falls apart against the FBI’s own paper trail. For years the Bureau has said openly that it reimburses X, formerly Twitter, and other providers for the cost of responding to legal process because a statute tells it to. Having already admitted the payments exist, it now insists that admitting the payments exist is too sensitive to hand over.
Reimbursing a company for pulling subpoena records is ordinary housekeeping. Paying a company to reshape what millions of people are allowed to post is a different animal, and that gap is the whole case. The government writes the definition of “misinformation.” If it also cut checks to the platforms enforcing that label, then a federal agency bought private censorship and sent the public the bill.
The refusal is strange. The Bureau won’t confirm records it has openly acknowledged in other settings and it won’t say why.
Casey Norman, Litigation Counsel at NCLA, put it this way. “The FBI is effectively saying: ‘We will not search, we will not explain, and we also will not acknowledge the existence of records that we’ve already acknowledged exist.’ That’s … not how FOIA works. If the Bureau used taxpayer money to fund online censorship, the American people deserves to know about it.”
The “Twitter Files,” the internal company records X owner Elon Musk released, already documented how closely federal agencies worked with platform staff on what stayed up and what came down. NCLA wants the ledger behind that relationship. The FBI wants to make sure the ledger never gets read.
There’s a cost to letting an agency behave this way, and it lands on anyone who has to sue for records the law already says are public. Zhonette Brown, NCLA’s General Counsel and Senior Litigation Counsel, named it.
“The FBI’s nonchalant refusal to adhere to FOIA’s requirements until it is sued defeats the entire purpose for FOIA, but it is all too common. Hopefully the Court wrings some clarity and compliance from the FBI.”
Now a judge gets to decide whether an agency can spend public money influencing public speech and keep the receipts locked in a box it refuses to open.
