America First Legal, the advocacy group founded by former Donald Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller, is leading a class-action lawsuit against several entities that conspired with the U.S. government to censor the speech of Americans.
The organizations sued by America First Legal include 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.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg askew on a TV ( MANDEL NGAN /Getty)
These organization formed a consortium called the “Election Integrity Partnership,” which played a key role in the social media censorship of “misinformation” in the 2020 and 2022 elections.
The 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.
“Today, America First Legal is striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex for our clients,” said America First Legal founder Stephen Miller in a statement.
“We are 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. To silence, banish, and deprive them of the means to earn a living.”
Each of the organizations named in the lawsuit have been the subject of public scandal for their role in censoring Americans. In October last year, Breitbart News reported on the consortium’s efforts to build a reporting system for state actors during the 2020 election, allowing the deep state to flag posts on social media platforms for censorship, escalating them as priorities for the tech giants.
Via Breitbart News:
In the runup to the 2020 election, the consortium created a system whereby state actors including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department could file “tickets” alongside news stories, flagging them so that Big Tech platforms could subsequently suppress or attach warning labels to them.
Beyond this blatant case of a private-public censorship coalition, the EIP also engaged in partisan politics, allowing the Democratic National Committee to file tickets through the system, as well as the Democrat-aligned groups Common Cause and the NAACP.
News outlets targeted by the EIP included Breitbart News, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Epoch Times, as well as the social media accounts of prominent conservatives Charlie Kirk, Tom Fitton, Jack Posobiec, Mark Levin, James O’Keefe, and Sean Hannity, amongst others.
President Donald Trump was also frequently flagged by the consortium, as well as his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
There is no doubt that the efforts of these organizations played a role in censoring the speech of Americans, and suppressed their ability to access information, on topics related to the 2020 election. The consortium boasted of the success of its efforts in a public report, stating that in 34 percent of cases where they flagged content to social media platforms, it was either labeled or removed.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.