Twitter Inc. said it sold data to the Cambridge University academic who had separately shared user data he gleaned from Facebook Inc. with third parties including the controversial research firm Cambridge Analytica.

The disclosure adds more detail about the activities of Cambridge University psychology professor Aleksandr Kogan, though in this instance there are no allegations that user privacy was compromised.

In 2015, Global Science Research, the firm Kogan created, had one-time access to a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 through April 2015, Twitter said.

Twitter said it conducted an internal review and didn’t find that GSR had access to any private data about people who use Twitter. “Unlike many other services, Twitter is public by its nature. People come to Twitter to speak publicly, and public tweets are viewable and searchable by anyone,” a spokeswoman for Twitter said in a statement.

Also popular on WSJ.com:

Twitter sold data to researcher linked to Cambridge Analytica