FTC opens 30-day comment period on X Corp petition to scrap 2022 $150M Twitter privacy order

On June 3, 2026 the Federal Trade Commission opened a 30-day public comment window — closing July 2, 2026 — on a petition by Elon Musk's X Corp asking the agency to set aside or modify the 2022 consent order imposed on what was then Twitter. That order carried a $150 million civil penalty after the FTC found Twitter had collected users' phone numbers and email addresses ostensibly for two-factor authentication and then used them for targeted advertising without disclosure, treated as a deceptive practice; it also imposed an expanded privacy-and-security mandate set to run roughly 20 years.

X argues the order should terminate by year-end 2026, contending that 'every individual responsible for the underlying failures has left the company,' that X has 'built a world-class privacy and data-protection program,' that the order duplicates existing frameworks and imposes 'millions of dollars in needless costs,' that vacating it 'safeguards First Amendment values,' and that doing so is 'critical to advancing American leadership in artificial intelligence' — language that drew scrutiny given Grok AI's training on user data. After the comment period the full Commission will vote on whether to grant, modify, or deny the request.

The move is notable as a sitting-administration FTC entertaining the rollback of a marquee privacy penalty obtained against the same company under prior leadership, and it follows the FTC's June 4 confirmation it was 'considering modifying or setting aside' the order. The petition is one of the first major tests of whether long-running privacy consent decrees can be unwound years early on the theory that corporate ownership and personnel have changed.