# Hines v. Stamos ***Hines v. Stamos*** (No. 3:23-cv-00571, W.D. La.) was a federal lawsuit filed on May 2, 2023, by [[America First Legal]], the group founded by [[Stephen Miller]], against the researchers behind the [[Election Integrity Partnership]] and its COVID-19 counterpart, the Virality Project. The plaintiffs were Jill Hines, co-director of the Louisiana group Health Freedom Louisiana, and [[Jim Hoft]], founder of [[The Gateway Pundit]]. They claimed the researchers had worked with the government to get their election and COVID-19 posts suppressed on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. On July 1, 2026, Judge [[Terry Doughty]] dismissed the case, finding that the plaintiffs had no standing and that his court had no jurisdiction over the defendants. **Why it's on the map:** The case took the [[Censorship Industrial Complex]] theory into court against private researchers instead of the government. After three years, including the discovery the plaintiffs asked for, it produced no evidence that the researchers caused any platform to act against the plaintiffs. By then the [[Stanford Internet Observatory]]'s election work had been shut down for two years. The plaintiffs lost the case, but the researchers still paid for three years of defense. ## The parties The court's ruling lists nine defendants: [[Alex Stamos]] and [[Renée DiResta]] of the Stanford Internet Observatory; Stanford University and its board of trustees; [[Kate Starbird]] of the University of Washington; the analytics firm [[Graphika]] and its researcher Camille François; and the Atlantic Council and Graham Brookie, head of its [[Digital Forensic Research Lab]]. America First Legal's early announcements also named the Aspen Institute, which does not appear among the defendants in the final ruling. The suit was filed in the same court, and before the same judge, as *Missouri v. Biden*, the case that became [[Murthy v. Missouri]]. Hines and Hoft were plaintiffs in that case too. ## Timeline | Date | Event | |---|---| | May 2, 2023 | America First Legal files the suit in the Monroe Division of the Western District of Louisiana | | Aug. 14, 2023 | The defendants move to send the case to arbitration and to dismiss it. Doughty denies the arbitration request and they appeal | | June 26, 2024 | The Supreme Court decides *Murthy v. Missouri*, holding that the plaintiffs there lacked standing | | July 30, 2024 | The Fifth Circuit (111 F.4th 551) says Doughty should have settled jurisdiction before arbitration, and sends the case back to decide standing in light of *Murthy* | | Dec. 2024 | Doughty declines to dismiss for now and lets the plaintiffs take discovery on jurisdiction | | Nov. 10, 2025 | The defendants renew their motion to dismiss | | July 1, 2026 | Doughty grants it and dismisses the claims without prejudice | ## The ruling - **Hines.** The court found nothing in discovery showing that the researchers had flagged her post to Facebook, and noted that Facebook's notice to her cited its own rules. "Plaintiffs do not provide any evidence that Hines' post was flagged to Facebook," Doughty wrote. - **Hoft.** His Twitter suspensions counted as an injury, but he could not trace them to the researchers. Some of the project's tracking tickets showed posts flagged to Twitter, but there was no evidence that Twitter acted because anyone pressured it. - **Future harm.** The court noted that both research projects had ended, so there was nothing left to stop. - **Jurisdiction.** Neither plaintiff showed that the defendants had done anything in Louisiana that connected to his or her claims. Hoft lives in Missouri. Techdirt reported that Doughty first entered an order dismissing the case with prejudice, which would have barred refiling, then issued a second order making the dismissal without prejudice. ## Why it matters The researchers were private actors. Under the First Amendment they could only be liable if they had acted as the government's agents, which made the suit a test of the claim that the platforms' moderation was government censorship carried out through research groups. Like *Murthy*, it failed at the first step: the plaintiffs could not connect what happened to their own accounts to the people they sued. DiResta, a defendant, called the case the Twitter Files conspiracy theory turned into a legal filing. The case ran alongside [[Jim Jordan]]'s House Judiciary Committee subpoenas to Stanford. In June 2024 Stanford ended the observatory's election work. The university cited funding; Platformer, which broke the story, tied the decision to the cost of the lawsuits and subpoenas. The same pattern appears in the end of the State Department's [[Global Engagement Center]], which closed without any court finding against it. ## Connections - [[America First Legal]] · [[Stephen Miller]] · [[Jim Hoft]] · [[The Gateway Pundit]] - [[Stanford Internet Observatory]] · [[Election Integrity Partnership]] · [[Alex Stamos]] · [[Renée DiResta]] · [[Kate Starbird]] - [[Graphika]] · [[Digital Forensic Research Lab]] - [[Terry Doughty]] · [[Murthy v. Missouri]] · [[Censorship Industrial Complex]] · [[Global Engagement Center]]