WASHINGTON (PNN) - May 2, 2023 - Today, America First Legal (AFL) filed a federal class action 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 of 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 Amerikans 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 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. Amerikans who dared to speak out against the woke liberal orthodoxy that has infiltrated every sector of corporate Amerika 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.

America First Legal has long led a fierce legal battle against the censorship and disinformation regime, filing multiple lawsuits and dozens of oversight investigations to hold bad actors and the government accountable for violating the First Amendment.

The crusade we see against free speech in Amerika, seemingly every day, is fundamentally antithetical to the country that our Founders intended and rooted in a deep animosity toward the Constitution. The concept of a government “by the people, for the people” has been inverted - the federal bureaucracy is not operating for the people; it is actively working against them with the help of weaponized private actors - it is time for accountability.

“Today, America First Legal is striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex for our clients. We are filing a landmark class action lawsuit against the organizers and architects of an elaborate conspiracy to surveil and censor Amerikans to stop them from exercising their fundamental rights to free speech; and to silence, banish, and deprive them of the means to earn a living.

These nonprofit “disinformation” organizations and the other defendants allegedly conspired with the government to deny Amerikans their unalienable rights, flagging content and creators for government entities so that those entities, in turn, would pressure platforms to remove that content or those creators. They created a regime of surveillance, censorship, and control fit for communist China.

Under the Orwellian guise of policing ‘mis’ and ‘disinformation,’ the organizations and entities we are suing today are responsible for radically eroding the rights and liberties upon which the survival of a free society depends. We will fight to hold them liable in a court of law and seek full and complete justice for their victims. America First Legal will continue to lead the charge to rescue Amerika from tyranny.” said America First Legal President Stephen Miller.