Lawsuit targets speech silencers, exposes censorship industry.

The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Lawsuit Alleges Government Actors Conspired with Big Tech to Violate First Amendment

A class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday alleges that members of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project conspired with government actors to censor speech at Big Tech companies in violation of the First Amendment. The case, Hines v. Stamos, promises to blow open the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

The plaintiffs, Jim Hoft, founder of The Gateway Pundit, and Jill Hines, co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana, filed suit in a federal court in Louisiana against the organizations and individuals behind the EIP and Virality Project. The 88-page complaint alleged four claims against the defendants, all of whom held roles in the EIP and Virality Project’s efforts to censor the plaintiffs’ speech.

The Allegations

The plaintiffs alleged that the defendants caused the censorship of Hines, Hoft, and other similarly situated individuals, based on their viewpoints related to the 2020 election and Covid-19. The complaint also detailed the extensive connections between, and involvement with, the government and the individual defendants and private entities.

According to the complaint, government actors helped coordinate the establishment of the EIP, funded its activities, and fed it complaints of supposed election and Covid disinformation and misinformation that the EIP then forwarded to the social media companies for censorship. The complaint also alleged the defendants viewed the EIP as a way to skirt the First Amendment and do for the government what the Constitution prohibited the government from doing for itself: censor speech.

What This Means for the Censors

While it is early days, Tuesday’s lawsuit proves promising for several reasons. First, the detailed allegations, which include the words of the defendants themselves, establish multiple connections among the government, the EIP, and the Virality Project, providing a solid basis for the First Amendment claims.

Second, attorney John Sauer is one of the plaintiffs’ named attorneys and has already cut his teeth in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against the government defendants who coordinated with the social media companies to censor speech. Most prominently, Sauer represents many of the plaintiffs in that case and deposed, among others, Elvis Chan, the FBI agent who coordinated many of the government’s censorship efforts. 

Further, this class-action lawsuit was filed in the same court as the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, the Western District of Louisiana, Monroe Division, which is where Hines resides. There is only one active federal judge in the Monroe Division — Trump appointee Terry A. Doughty — so it is likely the case will be assigned to him.

Judge Doughty’s handling of the Missouri v. Biden case suggests he will allow the plaintiffs in Hines v. Stamos to obtain some initial discovery before considering any motion by the defendants to dismiss the lawsuit. Similarly, it seems likely that, after the initial discovery, Doughty will deny a motion to dismiss just as he did in the Missouri v. Biden case, which will then allow full discovery. 

That’s when things will become really interesting. But Tuesday is the first step to getting there.