Will lawsuits finally hold Biden censorship regime accountable?

The “private side” of America’s mass public-private censorship regime may be about to face its day in court. Before, we told you about the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, and the integral role it’s played as the federal government’s “nerve center” in the censorship-industrial complex.

Evidence, particularly from Missouri and Louisiana et al. v. Biden shows it played a key role in coordinating meetings between government agencies and Big Tech partners to silence political and pandemic-related wrongthink under guise of national security and public health;

“switchboarded” such wrongthink to social media platforms for censorship;

and routed problematic content through other often government-linked research and academic organizations to do the flagging for censorship to social media platforms, to get around that pesky First Amendment.

Now maybe the biggest of the non-government partners with which government agencies, led by CISA, coordinated, the anti-disinformation consortium the Election Integrity Partnership, EIP, and its successor, the Virality Project are facing suit for upholding their half of the censorship bargain.

On May 2, plaintiffs Jill Hines and Jim Hoft brought suit against the often government-linked researchers, academics, and institutions behind these two consortia.

Hines is Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana. She launched an effort called Reopen Louisiana during the pandemic. Hines claims that her groups, and their followers on social media have experienced and continue to experience “extensive censorship of her speech on social media, including speech related to COVID-19 restrictions and election-related speech.”

Hoft, who runs The Gateway Pundit, a conservative website, claims such censorship. The Election Integrity Project has referred to him as the “Number Two superspreader” of misinformation on Twitter. The Virality Project has also flagged his vaccine-related speech content as “misinformation.”

In their suit, Hines v. Stamos, they argue the feds, led by CISA, helped birth the EIP, “designed to fill a ‘gap’ in the government’s ability to police so-called ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ about elections on social media” — that gap being the First Amendment, which it was designed to circumvent;

that the organizations that formed the EIP, and leaders atop them, had extensive ties through either funding or their professional positions to the federal government, and especially CISA – in fact, there was overlapping staffing between CISA and EIP;

federal and state officials flagged speech for censorship that EIP conveyed to the social media companies, which then killed the content – after surveilling, for example, 859 million social media posts on Twitter alone;

overwhelmingly, EIP targeted domestic speakers, and evidence suggests it was overwhelmingly from the right, and concerning the mechanics and outcomes of elections; that it was both viewpoint and content-based discrimination based on the evidence presented by the plaintiffs, implicating 22 million posts on Twitter alone during a four-month period in 2020;

These efforts continued in the 2022 election cycle.

The Virality Project included the EIP cohort and incorporated other institutions as well to combat so-called COVID-19 misinformation on social media.

The Virality Project also allegedly targeted speech on the basis of content and viewpoint – namely that questioning the safety and/or efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, heavily among domestic actors, and also those protesting vaccine passports and mandates – i.e. political speech.

Among the speech the Virality Project targeted for censorship was “True content which might promote vaccine hesitancy,” per the Twitter Files;

government officials – namely those from federal health agencies provided “tips” to the Virality Project about misinformation on social media, which it flagged to platforms for censorship.

Six social media platforms led by Facebook, Twitter, and Google/YouTube acknowledged that they received tickets from the Virality Project and flagged it for review and action per their policies;

These censorship activities, according to the filing, include targeting certain defendants on the basis of race, religion, and background to prevent them from hearing disfavored speech.

The plaintiffs point to a raft of examples of their speech being censored, thanks to EIP and the Virality Project’s efforts.

They allege, among other things, that the defendants in the case “conspired with each other and with others for the purpose of depriving, either directly or indirectly…plaintiffs…of…rights to freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom to petition the government, and freedom to read and listen to the speech of others, all on a discriminatory and invidious basis, and thus to deprive them of the equal protection of the laws, and of equal privileges and immunities under the laws.”

They are suing for damages, and to declare that the defendants have violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the constitution among other laws, and to prevent the defendants from continuing to engage in such conduct.

So is this case going anywhere?

We know that the companion, public side Missouri and Louisiana v. Biden case has.

And it turns out that this case is being brought before the same federal judge who has allowed that other case to proceed, including the robust discovery efforts that have revealed this censorship regime, and that one of the key lawyers for the plaintiffs in Hines v. Stamos is also a key lawyer for the plaintiffs in that other case.

So will we get discovery here? Will the speech-stiflers be held to account?

Stay tuned.