Lawsuit Targets Groups Allegedly Involved in ‘Mass Surveillance and Censorship Operation’

America First Legal (AFL), a nonprofit organization, filed a federal class-action lawsuit on Tuesday against those behind the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project, Reclaim the Net reports.

The defendants are accused of colluding with the U.S. government to carry out extensive online censorship.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Health Freedom Louisiana co-director Jill Hines and The Gateway Pundit news site founder Jim Hoft, reads, “This case challenges probably the largest mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program in American history.”

The suit names Stanford Internet Observatory, its director and research manager Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta, University of Washington’s Dr. Kate Starbird, Graphika (a social media analytics company), and the Atlantic Research Council’s Digital Forensic Lab as defendants.

The groups allegedly monitored 859 million posts and tracked 22 million posts as “candidates” for censorship on Twitter alone in 2020, before the platform’s ownership change.

In the first seven months of 2021, the focus shifted to COVID-related posts, with AFL claiming 200 million engagements were flagged and tracked to determine if they should be censored.

The lawsuit asserts that the projects and individuals involved worked together with the federal government to censor political speech on not only Twitter but also Facebook and YouTube.

The nonprofit organization contends that the defendants aimed to suppress what the plaintiffs considered legitimate political speech surrounding the U.S. 2020 election and issues such as Covid vaccines and pandemic mandates, primarily targeting conservative voices questioning the election’s integrity.

The lawsuit accuses U.S. national security officials at the federal level of orchestrating this vast surveillance operation to bypass First Amendment speech protections.

These protections prohibit the government from censoring speech if it adheres to the Constitution. If the allegations are proven accurate, AFL states that this behavior would constitute “an overt, intentional, and explosive violation of the Constitution at the hands of the government.”

AFL President Stephen Miller describes the lawsuit as a “landmark” moment in combating “the censorship-industrial complex,” Reclaim the Net notes.

The alleged censorship and deplatforming have developed under the pretext of fighting misinformation, according to the nonprofit.

Read the lawsuit here:

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