A Regime ‘Fit for Communist China’: Lawsuit Filed Against US Social Media Censorship Collusion

Lawsuit targets groups that aid government censorship and interference in the dissemination of free speech online

The censored tweet from U.S. President Donald Trump, on a phone in Finland, on May 29, 2020. Olivier Morin/AFP via Getty Images

A lawsuit by America First Legal (AFL) alleges that certain entities colluded with the American government to enforce censorship of issues like the 2020 election and COVID-19 on social media platforms.

According to a May 2 press release, the federal class action lawsuit was filed against individuals and entities identified as having “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.”

The mass surveillance and censorship unleashed by these parties allegedly targeted the political speech of millions of Americans on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, affecting conservative speech on issues like COVID-19 vaccines, election integrity, and vaccine mandates.

According to the lawsuit (pdf), it challenges “probably the largest mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program in American history,” which includes two initiatives—the “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP) and the “Virality Project” (VP). Both these programs are said to be ongoing.

The EIP was launched in 2020 and is said to have engaged in the mass surveillance of 859 million posts on Twitter alone.

The lawsuit claims that 72 percent of censorship tickets processed by the EIP were related to the “so-called delegitimization” of the 2020 election results, with more than 99 percent of those social media posts throttled during the election period.

The lawsuit notes that EIP admitted that it “overwhelmingly targeted politically conservative or right-leaning speech” for censorship. It cited an EIP report claiming that the “primary repeat spreaders of false and misleading narratives” included former President Donald Trump and his family.

“Left-wing groups like MITRE, Common Cause, the DNC, the Defending Digital Democracy Project, and the NAACP submitted tickets reporting speech to the EIP.” However, “EIP does not report that any right-wing political groups submitted tickets to the EIP.”

The EIP succeeded in getting social media platforms to censor speech. According to the lawsuit, 35 percent of URLs that EIP shared with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok were either removed, labeled, or soft-blocked.

EIP tickets and URLs included “millions of social media posts, including almost 22 million posts on Twitter alone over a four-month period in 2020.”

The organization “repeatedly” flagged plaintiff Jim Hoft’s website, The Gateway Pundit, as a “purveyor of social-media misinformation.” The Gateway Pundit was ranked above Trump, Breitbart News, and Sean Hannity as a “repeat spreader of election misinformation.”

Censoring COVID-19 Content

In 2021, the defendants expanded censorship activities to speech related to COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines, and COVID-19 restrictions and mandates.

The Virality Project “targets right-leaning political and religious speech associated with distrust and opposition to government mandates, including prominent right-wing speakers,” the lawsuit states.

During a seven-month period, VP is said to have targeted narratives that “questioned the safety, distribution, and effectiveness of vaccines.”

Claiming that vaccines contain material objectionable on religious grounds or are produced by pharma firms that have repeatedly concealed harm in favor of profits was seen as anti-vaccine misinformation.

“The VP focuses, not just on misinformation about vaccines, but political speech and political organizing against vaccine passports and vaccine mandates,” the lawsuit said.

Conservative speech opposing government-imposed mandates and opposition to vaccine mandates by employers were viewed as misinformation. In addition, opposition to mask mandates and lockdowns were classified as the “viewpoint of the right-wing political spectrum,” the lawsuit notes.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson was cited 42 times in a VP report, calling him “one of the most prominent and sensationalist spreaders of false or misleading information about vaccines throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Others targeted by VP include vaccine safety activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Candace Owens, Dr. Joseph Mercola, and the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, Dr. Simone Gold.

The lawsuit notes that “the VP also targets truthful speech for censorship; it successfully induces social-media platforms to censor and suppress COVID-related speech that was not false or, in many cases, not even violative of platform policies.”

The VP’s monitoring tracked content with about “6.7 million engagements on social media per week, or over 200 million engagements” over a period of seven months.

In March, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi revealed information about the alleged collusion between the Virality Project and Twitter to censor content deemed misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. VP also colluded with the government, he said.

In a social media post, Taibbi called the Virality Project a “smash success” as “government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.”

Government Involvement

“Four entities—Stanford Internet Observatory, University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Lab—collaborate closely with federal, state, and local government officials to monitor and censor disfavored viewpoints on social media.”

The EIP was formed between these four institutions with the aim of “censorship and suppression of disfavored speech on social media,” the lawsuit states. The entities later focused on speech deemed COVID-19 misinformation under the VP.

The lawsuit indicates that the EIP was created in consultation with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security. CISA interns are said to have originated the idea for the EIP.

“The EIP was designed to fill a ‘gap’ in the government’s ability to police so-called ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ about elections on social media,” the lawsuit stated.

“Renee DiResta has indicated that the EIP was designed to evade the legal and constitutional issues that would arise if CISA or other government agencies were to engage directly in mass-monitoring and censorship of speech on social media.”

In addition to CISA, other government partners who submit tips to the EIP include the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, which is an organization of state and local government officials coordinated by the Center for Internet Security “pursuant to funding from CISA.”

‘Orwellian,’ Unconstitutional Actions

The lawsuit insists that the censorship actions of the defendants are “brazenly unlawful and unconstitutional” as the government is prohibited from inducing, encouraging, or promoting private persons to accomplish objectives that it is constitutionally forbidden from accomplishing.

“Defendants launched their colossal mass-surveillance and censorship program, in close cooperation with government officials, precisely because those officials lack the resources and the legal authority to do so directly.”

The lawsuit cites the Stanford Internet Observatory and its Director and Research Manager, Alex Stamos and Renee DiResta, Dr. Kate Starbird of the University of Washington, Graphika, and the Atlantic Research Council’s Digital Forensic Lab as defendants in the case.

AFL has filed the lawsuit 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.

“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,” AFL’s President Stephen Miller said.

AFL’s lawsuit comes as Republicans in the House have subpoenaed multiple Biden officials for the administration’s push to censor social media users by coordinating with Big Tech.

The subpoenas were sent by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, on April 28 to CISA Director Jen Easterly, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, and James Rubin, an official at the GEC.

The three individuals are said to have not responded adequately to requests for providing documents and communications between their agencies and social media platforms.