The US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana has allowed the Hines v. Stamos case to proceed to discovery.
Jill Hines, who is the founder of consumer and human rights group Health Freedom Louisiana, and Jim Hoft, founder of the Gateway Pundit news site – sued a number of nonprofits, researchers, and academic institutions for allegedly taking part in censoring their Covid and election-related online speech as “disinformation.”
We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.
According to the filing, these groups and individuals – the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), Graphika, the Atlantic Council, the Aspen Institute, Alex Stamos, Kate Starbird, and others – were conspiring with government officials to carry out First Amendment violations by pressuring social sites to censor content.
The defendants then filed two motions to dismiss the case, arguing lack of standing and jurisdiction. Judge Terry Doughty has now ruled to deny both motions without prejudice, meaning that both can be refiled after jurisdictional discovery.
Regarding jurisdiction, the judge said the plaintiffs did not establish that the court had personal jurisdiction over them, but that the arguments they presented were sufficient to allow discovery.
The same was ruled regarding standing, i.e., the discovery was allowed as the plaintiffs, the judge believes, showed that their speech was restricted because of their actions, not those platforms’ own rules (as alleged by the defendants).
Here, the motion cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in Murthy v. Missouri in a bid to dismiss the case brought by Hines, Hoft, and possibly others in this putative class action (meaning it could involve other individuals going forward.)
But Judge Doughty stated that the defendants misunderstood the outcome of Murthy v. Missouri, regarding standing – the landmark case did not find that plaintiffs there lacked standing for the case but for a preliminary injunction. And, he remarked, that case has in fact not been dismissed, as the defendants claim.
These decisions do not mean that the Stanford Internet Observatory et al., may not yet manage to have the case against them dismissed after preliminary procedure that has now been allowed to take place.
They could prevail (on jurisdiction or standing), or if it is found that they acted privately and not in collusion with the government.
