A federal judge in Louisiana has dismissed a lawsuit that accused disinformation researchers and their institutions of censoring conservative speakers online, finding that the plaintiffs could not show the researchers caused social media platforms to moderate their posts.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty granted a renewed motion to dismiss in Hines v. Stamos, a case brought by Jill Hines and Jim Hoft, the founder of The Gateway Pundit. The plaintiffs were represented by America First Legal, the group founded by Stephen Miller. The defendants included Alex Stamos, Renée DiResta, Stanford University and its Board of Trustees, Kate Starbird, Graphika, Camille François, the Atlantic Council and Graham Brookie.
The ruling matters less because it says something exotic about the First Amendment than because it says something ordinary: private researchers are not the government, and plaintiffs still need evidence connecting a defendant’s conduct to an alleged injury. That evidentiary part, the boring machinery of litigation, is where the censorship theory broke.
The traceability problem
Doughty said Hines and Hoft lacked standing because they had not shown that the researchers’ work led Facebook or other platforms to restrict their accounts or posts. The judge relied on the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Murthy v. Missouri, which rejected a related challenge over government contacts with social media platforms and emphasized that plaintiffs must trace moderation decisions to the defendants they sued.
For Hines, Doughty found no evidence that her Facebook post had been reported to Facebook by the Election Integrity Partnership or the Virality Project. The court also said the subject of her post, political activism around ending the public health emergency, fell outside the election-related monitoring at issue in the case.
The court pointed to Facebook’s existing moderation rules as another problem for the plaintiffs. Doughty wrote that Facebook had its own policies covering allegedly false or misleading claims, including election and health-related misinformation. Hines, the court said, had received Facebook’s own policy explanation when the platform acted against her content.
For Hoft and The Gateway Pundit, the court found that some posts or links were included in tickets created by the Election Integrity Partnership or the Virality Project. But Doughty said the record did not establish that those tickets caused platforms to take action. According to the ruling, platform responses varied: some said content was under review, some said it did not violate rules, some indicated action had already been taken, and some reflected prior labeling by the platform.
That distinction is not a footnote. A researcher telling a platform, “this may violate your rules,” is not the same thing as a state actor ordering removal. The plaintiffs needed the second thing, or at least evidence close enough to it. Doughty said they did not have it.
A case with collateral damage
The lawsuit ran for more than three years. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick reported that, during that time, some researchers reduced their work or left for other jobs, while the Stanford Internet Observatory effectively shut down after becoming a target in the broader fight over disinformation research.
Starbird and DiResta, both defendants, posted on Bluesky after the dismissal. Starbird wrote that she and colleagues had been sued by America First Legal and said the case rested on false allegations. DiResta wrote that the plaintiffs claimed the researchers had censored them and called that claim false.
The dismissal may not be the last word. Doughty first entered an order dismissing the case with prejudice, which would block the plaintiffs from refiling an amended version. He then issued another order dismissing it without prejudice, with no explanation cited by Techdirt. That leaves room for more procedural churn, because apparently three years was not enough paperwork.
The case also sits in the shadow of Doughty’s earlier ruling in the Biden administration social media case. In 2023, he issued a broad injunction restricting government contacts with platforms. The Fifth Circuit later narrowed that order, and the Supreme Court threw out the case in 2024, saying the record did not show the required link between government conduct and platform moderation decisions.
In this case, Doughty applied that same standing logic to private researchers. The result: no traceable injury, no jurisdiction, and no live censorship lawsuit against the researchers, at least for now.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
