America First Legal, a legal advocacy group founded by former senior adviser to President Donald Trump Stephen Miller, is leading a class-action lawsuit against a consortium of organizations that collaborated with the US government to censor Americans’ speech. The lawsuit targets the Stanford Internet Observatory, Graphika, and the Atlantic Research Council’s Digital Forensic Lab, among others, who formed the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which helped social media platforms censor “misinformation” in the 2020 and 2022 elections.
The lawsuit alleges that the organizations colluded with the federal government to conduct mass surveillance and censorship of Americans’ political speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
The organizations named in the lawsuit have previously been involved in censoring Americans, and in some cases, the EIP engaged in partisan politics by allowing the Democratic National Committee to file tickets through the system. The targeted news outlets included Breitbart News, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Epoch Times, as well as social media accounts belonging to prominent conservatives, including Charlie Kirk, Tom Fitton, Jack Posobiec, Mark Levin, James O’Keefe, and Sean Hannity, among others. The EIP boasted of the success of its efforts in a public report, stating that in 34 percent of cases where it flagged content to social media platforms, it was either labeled or removed.
America First Legal alleges that the consortium of organizations participated in an elaborate conspiracy to silence Americans, deprive them of their fundamental right to free speech, and banish them from their means to earn a living. The lawsuit is a landmark class-action suit that seeks to expose and defang the censorship-industrial complex for the plaintiffs.
The organization released a statement declaring that it is “striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex“ by “filing a landmark class action lawsuit against the organizers and architects of an elaborate conspiracy to surveil and censor Americans to stop them from exercising their fundamental right to free speech.”
The statement continues:
These nonprofit “disinformation” organizations and the other defendants allegedly conspired with the government to deny Americans their inalienable 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 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 America from tyranny.” said Stephen Miller.
The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) is a consortium of organizations that was formed to tackle online election-related misinformation and disinformation and to monitor and mitigate any online election-related disinformation campaigns during the 2020 US presidential election. The EIP’s members include experts in social media analysis, disinformation, and media manipulation.
The consortium’s primary objective was ostensibly to identify, assess, and mitigate any online election-related disinformation campaigns. The group’s experts analyzed online media manipulation campaigns and any online disinformation campaigns related to the 2020 US presidential election, but their true role went far beyond simply rooting out fake news online.
The collusion of the EIP with the US government in censoring American speech is a covert violation of people’s First Amendment rights. Since the state is prohibited by the Constitution from directly taking action to suppress dissenting voices and surveil the people, it has resorted to outsourcing its tyranny to private organizations that are more than willing to do the government’s bidding.
The EIP’s actions of suppressing speech, flagging posts for censorship, and collaborating with the government to surveil Americans’ political speech on social media platforms undermine people’s right to free speech. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that their operations were not designed to ensure people were receiving accurate information. Rather, it was a politically-motivated effort to suppress viewpoints that do not align with progressive ideology and the Democratic party. The consortium rarely, if ever, targeted information disseminated by left-leaning entities.
Suing the EIP is the right move to protect people’s First Amendment rights. The lawsuit aims to hold the EIP accountable for conspiring with the government to conduct mass surveillance and censorship of Americans’ political speech on social media platforms. By holding the EIP accountable, the lawsuit aims to ensure that Americans’ First Amendment rights are protected, ensuring that they can exercise their fundamental right to free speech without fear of censorship.
The lawsuit is also an essential step in bringing transparency to the EIP’s operations and holding them accountable for their actions. The group’s actions have been shrouded in secrecy, and its role in suppressing speech and collaborating with the government to censor Americans has not been fully exposed. The lawsuit aims to bring to light the organization’s activities and to hold the organization accountable. By doing so, the lawsuit seeks to ensure that organizations like the EIP do not engage in conspiracies to suppress speech and violate Americans’ constitutional rights.
The legal system is one of the few methods by which folks on the right can combat attempts to limit our reach on the internet. By attacking censorship groups through the courts, and exposing their machinations, groups like America First Legal can work to prevent them from helping the government violate our rights. Hopefully, there will be more such lawsuits in the future.
