Suppose that were true. Then they would want to conduct this as publicly and noisily as possible in order to propagate that fear. Which would be counter to what Streisand Effect suggests.
You'd want to do this loudly enough that other dissidents hear and are afraid but not so loudly that other citizens get word and potentially join the dissidents' side. You don't want a public lawsuit. You want Twitter to silently hand over the data and for the last tweet from the account to be "Got fired today :(".
fewer people will do this if they see that there are real consequences to dissent.