Happy July 4! We beat Stephen Miller in court.
A federal court dismissed Hines v. Stamos in full — America First Legal's "censorship" suit against the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project. No standing, no jurisdiction, no evidence.
Happy Independence Day!
Today I want to tell a story about something that my colleagues and I have been dealing with for the last three years
In May 2023, America First Legal — Stephen Miller’s lawsuit mill — sued us on behalf of Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit and Jill Hines, an anti-vaccine activist in Louisiana we’d never heard of. The lawsuit claimed that two academic research projects I helped lead — the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and the Virality Project (VP) — were actually mass-surveillance-and-censorship operations targeting conservatives. It was the “Censorship Industrial Complex” Twitter Files conspiracy theory rendered as a legal filing.
On July 1, 2026, Judge Terry Doughty dismissed it: no standing, no jurisdiction, and, after the discovery the plaintiffs demanded, no evidence. As the opinion put it: “The Court agrees with Defendants that ‘discovery has confirmed the absence of any factual basis to conclude the EIP or VP, let alone any particular Defendant, coerced any social media platform to censor Plaintiffs’ posts or accounts.’”
It took three years and an extraordinary amount of time and money to get here, which was of course the point. The process is the punishment, as the saying goes.
I’m telling this story on July 4th because three years ago today, the same judge who just dismissed our case released an incendiary opinion in Murthy v Missouri. On July 4, 2023, Judge Terry Doughty granted a sweeping injunction restricting large swaths of the federal government from even talking to tech platforms, declaring that — if the allegations were true — the case revealed “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” They weren’t true; Justice Amy Coney Barrett would go on to point out “clearly erroneous” lower court findings. But in that opinion, Doughty also made up a quote and attributed it to me: he wrote, four times, that I had said the EIP was designed to “get around unclear legal authorities, including very real First Amendment questions.”
This was nonsense; I never said it. But because our case was in front of him, I couldn’t publicly respond in the way it deserved — you aren’t supposed to piss off the judge by correcting him, even when he deserves it. So on July 4, 2023, instead of enjoying a family barbeque, I dealt with a nasty media cycle and threats as right-wing media, conspiracy theorists, and Substack profiteers glommed on to this ridiculous opinion.
This July 4 is different.
What we did, what they said
The plaintiffs claimed we had conspired with the federal government to censor them on Facebook and Twitter, and they sought damages on behalf of a class of “millions.”
Their complaint’s opening line calls our research “probably the largest mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program in American history” — probably doing heroic work to bolster a claim discovery would later demolish. It continues: “On information and belief, its censorship encompasses thousands of speakers and millions of social-media posts.” (”On information and belief” is a legal term of art for “we don’t actually know this, but we’d like to say it anyway.”)
Their “information” and “belief” drew heavily from the theory of the Censorship Industrial Complex, which has never existed. It is a hoax pushed by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Mike Benz, and Elon Musk; laundered and legitimized by election-denying political elites like Jim Jordan and Dan Bishop in Congress; and pushed through the courts by ideologues like MO AG/Senator Eric Schmitt, America First Legal, and the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Together they formed a political machine that leveraged puppet media, subpoena power, and a virtually unlimited war chest for filing expensive and time-consuming litigation.
The defendants were Alex Stamos and me at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Stanford, Kate Starbird at the University of Washington, the analysis firm Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. Private actors.
What we had actually done, in 2020, was run the Election Integrity Partnership: a nonpartisan research collaboration, staffed mostly by undergraduates, that tracked viral rumors about voting procedures and efforts to preemptively delegitimize the election. Ballots in dumpsters. Allegedly dead voters. Sharpiegate. Analysts logged each rumor in a Jira ticket — a case file in project-management software, the same tool your IT department likely uses. Outsiders could send us tips; we told both the DNC and the RNC to feel free to do so. When content appeared to violate a platform’s election integrity policies in a significant way, we sometimes shared the ticket with the relevant platform.
Then the platforms then did whatever they wanted. About two-thirds of the time they took no action at all. When they did act, it was overwhelmingly to slap on a disputed content or a “go learn more” label. Contrary to what the Twitter Files hoaxers sold their audiences (they made money from these false accusations), there was very little taken down. What they never tell their audiences is that what DID come down was almost entirely threats of violence, phishing content, and fake official accounts.
The Virality Project was a smaller project that produced public briefings about COVID-19 vaccine rumors for a few months around the vaccine rollout. Few tickets were sent to platforms, because the goal was to enable public health officials to understand what was viral so that they could counter-speak and respond to public concerns. None of this work was done in secret. We published constantly on open websites with social media and email lists.
The Machine
So where did the lawsuit come from?
Starting in late 2022, Mike Benz – a former Trump official and alt-right YouTuber who called himself “Frame Game” (and wrote that Hitler had some decent points) — started a blog he called the Foundation for Freedom Online. Using this lofty brand, Benz reframed our work as a censorship plot directed by the government. He claimed we’d gotten 22 million tweets censored, to tilt the election — a manipulative and false twisting of an after-election analysis that we’d published counting the number of tweets in the most viral election rumors of 2020.
Benz traded his theory up the chain. He reached out to Taibbi, and positioned himself as a State Department insider despite working there for approximately two months. Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Tablet journalist Jacob Siegel bought in, regurgitating Benz’s allegations and framing them as having been corroborated by the Twitter Files. Taibbi went so far as to cut emails in half to manipulate public perception of our work. Musk amplified everything to millions of people. Jim Jordan used the accusations to justify congressional subpoenas investigating “mass censorship”.
Then AFL sued us.
The suit cited Benz’s theories. AFL’s press release on the lawsuit announced that we’d “Surveilled 859 Million and Tracked 22 Million Posts as ‘Misinformation’ on Twitter Alone.” Stephen Miller said that we had “created a regime of surveillance, censorship, and control fit for communist China.”
What discovery showed
In December 2024, when Doughty permitted jurisdictional discovery, AFL declared “VICTORY.” Its senior counsel wrote, “We are confident the documents and testimony will establish their active steps to censor citizens in Louisiana and others around the country.”
It didn’t.
I mentioned earlier that we’d never heard of Jill Hines. She was basically an address, chosen to sue us because she got them the sympathetic judge that they wanted. But even he, looking at the actual record, had to admit there was no there there.
Hines alleged the Virality Project pushed platforms to censor her Facebook groups. Discovery established that in the entire history of both projects, her content appeared in exactly one ticket — in the Election Integrity Project’s work! An outside tip had included a list of pages for EIP to look over; it was marked *out of scope* by the analyst who reviewed it, noting “no election-related content was found.”
No EIP or Virality Project document shows anyone flagging any Hines post to any platform, ever. When Facebook restricted her group shortly after, it cited its own “Inauthentic Behavior” policy. The opinion is unambiguous: “Here, no one placed anything on Facebook’s radar.” Hines’ lawyers’ fallback — that the timing was suspicious — was dispatched by the judge as “a final Hail Mary.”
Despite three years of claims that our work was a mass-censorship project, the federal court that looked at the facts described the Virality Project as what it always was: “a research project aimed at analyzing online mis- and dis-information relating to COVID-19.”
Hoft did not do better. We did mention the Gateway Pundit in our tickets, because it spent 2020 pushing out some of the most widely circulated stolen-election fiction in the country. Nineteen tickets had Gateway Pundit content, and some were flagged to platforms. That is not a scandal; it is what happens when a site spends an election cycle manufacturing and distributing election rumors that fall within the scope of an election-rumor research project.
The tickets showed platforms doing exactly what independent companies do: sometimes reviewing and declining, sometimes saying the content didn’t violate their rules. As Doughty’s opinion pointed out, in one ticket that we forwarded, Facebook had already labeled the post hours before we flagged it. The platforms were not waiting on college students for instructions, or intimidated into obedience by an academic research project.
Twitter suspended Hoft’s account in February 2021, months after EIP’s rumor observation work had wrapped; discovery produced nothing showing any connection between us and that action.
The process was the punishment
I am very happy that we won. But to be clear: I lost my job because of these attacks. Stanford fought the legal fight — it spent millions doing so, and I’m grateful — but it shut down the Stanford Internet Observatory after the combined weight of lawsuits, subpoenas, and political pressure. It did not want to fight in the court of public opinion, or correct the lies in the public domain. (The paperback version of my book is coming out next month; it explains why). Others among my co-defendants were put through years of stress, FOIA harassment, contractual retaliation, and more.
Meanwhile, the machine keeps lying and moving the goalposts. It needs a villain and a theory of “mass censorship” to justify ref-working tech platforms and dismantling election integrity and foreign interference infrastructure. The “22 million tweets” zombie statistic — the number that launched a thousand congressional hearings — has been corrected in the public record in a million places. Jim Jordan publicly released the tickets we sent to platforms; they show no demands from the government, no plot to censor, no mass censorship. The puppet media have never acknowledged this.
The theory performs beautifully in podcasts, congressional hearings, and donor emails, but it collapses every time it is tested somewhere with rules of evidence. These legal losses matter: they demolish the theories being used to justify real policy, and they show the alleged censorship regime evaporating the moment plaintiffs have to produce evidence. Mainstream media should stop treating them as non-events and cover them.
America First Legal has a bottomless war chest, and the lawsuit mill doesn’t need winning verdicts; the filing was a victory. The point was to make the work expensive, frightening, and professionally dangerous — and nothing will be done to hold AFL accountable. That asymmetry is the whole business model of the bullshit industrial complex. The people it targets — researchers, election officials, civil society — usually can’t spend millions of dollars and years of their lives to prove a negative. The liars know it. They are proud of this machine.
I am proud of their hatred. But institutions that claim to care about liberal values need to see this kind of attack clearly for what it is: lawfare, propaganda, and institutional intimidation dressed up as a civil liberties fight. Responding requires pointing out the lie, and what it was used to justify.
Happy Independence Day. Three years ago, a judge marked the holiday by declaring a massive attack on free speech had happened. This week, after discovery, his own court dismissed our case.
What a great way to celebrate the 4th! 🇺🇸 so pleased for all of you.
It is amazing to me when Miller-type people encounter the reality that the kind of baseless, frothing hyperbole that works within their media hemisphere doesn’t have magic, incantatory powers within a court of law. “Oh yeah this is my homegirl Renee; she ran <checks notes> probably the largest mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program in American history.”