Hines v. Stamos, Dismissed in Full - by Renee DiResta

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Hines v. Stamos, Dismissed in Full<br>A federal court found no evidence that EIP or the Virality Project coerced any platform to censor the plaintiffs.

Renee DiResta<br>Jul 06, 2026

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Over on Agents of Influence, I just published the story of a frivolous America First Legal lawsuit, Hines v. Stamos, that falsely accused my colleagues and me of running “an unconstitutional censorship scheme.” It took 3 years to get the case dismissed.<br>I thought it would be useful here to lay out the false claims they made and what the Judge’s opinion said. Why? Because right-wing media does entire spin cycles on just filing the suit, or winning some micro-victory, and then no one ever covers the fact that they actually lost in the end. An accusation produces publicity; exoneration produces silence. This means it’s been days and as of last night, several answer engines still didn’t know the facts!<br>There are some fantastic quotes from the Judge’s opinion, which are particularly remarkable because this judge, as I explained over on Agents of Influence, was the judge in Murthy v. Missouri. In an opinion he released in Murthy, he made up a quote and attributed it to me, claiming I’d said that we did our work to “get around” the First Amendment. He was very sympathetic to the censorship cabal nonsense.<br>So let’s break down why even he realized the case was a loser.<br>What was the Hines v Stamos court case?

The lawsuit — filed May 2, 2023 by America First Legal on behalf of Jill Hines of Health Freedom Louisiana and Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit — alleged that the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and the Virality Project (VP) were part of a federal-government apparatus that surveilled and censored conservative speech on social media. After court-ordered jurisdictional discovery, the court found the record contained no factual basis for that theory as applied to either plaintiff.<br>The defendants were: me, Renée DiResta; Alex Stamos; the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University; the Leland Stanford Junior University; Kate Starbird; Graphika; Camille François; the Atlantic Council; and Graham Brookie.<br>What was the supposed evidence? When Stephen Miller’s America First Legal filed the case, they cited “CIA CIA CIA” fabulist Mike Benz, aka Frame Game, to allege that we’d flagged or sought to censor (the language moves) 22 million tweets. (The 22 million figure was a post-election research tally of tweets about viral 2020 rumors — not posts flagged, removed, or “tracked for censorship.” I’ve debunked it at length, repeatedly.) Benz, it’s worth pointing out, had been associated with Stephen Miller’s team at the White House. The effort to smear and sue us was the work of a motivated political machine; it was the Twitter Files in legal form.<br>What did the court conclude in the Hines v. Stamos case?

From page 17 of the Memorandum Ruling, the court agreed with defendants (us) that:<br>“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.”

That’s pretty direct! The court found no evidence that the Election Integrity Partnership or Virality Project coerced, significantly encouraged, or otherwise caused any platform to censor either plaintiff.<br>And so, on July 1, 2026, the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana finally dismissed Hines v. Stamos in full (No. 3:23-cv-00571-TAD-KDM). Judge Terry A. Doughty granted our Motion to Dismiss for Lack of Subject Matter and Personal Jurisdiction.<br>The court held that plaintiffs Jill Hines and Jim Hoft lacked Article III standing, that the court lacked personal jurisdiction over all nine defendants, and that claims for prospective relief failed. The case was dismissed without prejudice.<br>Did the Election Integrity Partnership or Virality Project censor Jill Hines?

No. And this was tested in discovery.<br>I want to first be clear that we had never heard of Jill Hines before we learned that she was suing us. So why was she a plaintiff in this case? Jill Hines was, in practical terms, a vehicle for venue selection. She was also a plaintiff in Murthy v. Missouri; for both, her residence placed the case before Judge Doughty.<br>This meant we had to go through jurisdictional discovery to prove that we had not “targeted” Louisiana, among other things. Here is how discovery went where Hines was concerned:<br>Hines’ content appeared in exactly one ticket in the history of both EIP and Virality Project, and it was the election work, not the vaccine work: EIP-78 documented an outside tip with a list of pages. One of them was Hines’ Reopen Louisiana Facebook group. The analyst who glanced at it immediately realized it was wholly unrelated to the project, and marked it out of scope. Nothing else was done.

Discovery produced no document showing EIP or VP...