WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, America First Legal (AFL) filed a federal class action lawsuit against key persons and entities involved in the so-called “Election Integrity Partnership” and the “Virality Project,” on behalf of Jill Hines, the co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana, and Jim Hoft, the founder the popular news website The Gateway Pundit.Defendants include the Stanford Internet Observatory and its Director and Research Manager, Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta, Dr. Kate Starbird of the University of Washington, Graphika, and the Atlantic Research Council’s Digital Forensic Lab.
This historic lawsuit alleges that these parties conspired with the federal government to conduct a mass surveillance and censorship operation targeting the political speech of millions of Americans on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (under its prior ownership). This operation was specifically designed to target conservative political speech on questions of great public interest like election integrity, COVID-19 vaccines, and vaccine mandates.
The scope of the surveillance and censorship cannot be overstated. The Defendants admitted that during 2020, they surveilled a staggering 859 million posts on Twitter alone and that they tracked for possible censorship almost 22 million Tweets. Again, during seven months in 2021, they tracked posts about COVID-19 with about 200 million engagements for possible censorship. Americans who dared to speak out against the woke liberal orthodoxy that has infiltrated every sector of corporate America would face the threat of censorship and de-platforming by Big Tech giants and these elusive surveillance organizations acting together with the federal government.
AFL’s lawsuit alleges that this massive operation was concocted in collusion with government officials — including federal national security officials — to evade the First Amendment, all while shielding the government bureaucracy. If proven, this is an overt, intentional, and explosive violation of the Constitution at the hands of the government.
