Sept 17 · Washington, DCRestore the First publicly launches at CHD’s
To Form a More Perfect Future — with Sen. Ron Johnson, Sen. Rand Paul, and
Rep. Thomas Massie.
Six Americans named.Millions more silenced.You’re next until Congress acts.
Our case was dismissed.
Our demand for a public accounting has not.
The ask — one sentence
Congress must hold public hearings, preserve the
records, and pass enforceable safeguards — including a private right
of action — for Americans censored through government pressure on
platforms.
Six Americans were named in a report, penalized across platforms and payment
systems, and dismissed by the court on procedural grounds — before a single email
was compelled or a single witness heard. They did it to us. They walked.
6of us were named in the report
Millionsmore were silenced in the same era
0relief for either group without Congress
“The court did not find that the
alleged censorship system did not exist. It said the pleading’s structure prevented it
from reaching that question at all.”
§ 01 The Case
Six Americans. One list. A machinery that did the rest.
The plaintiffs in Finn v. Global Engagement Center did not come to court as
strangers to this system. Each was publicly named in the “Disinformation Dozen”
report — a document that did not merely criticize their views but urged platforms to
deplatform the named individuals, their organizations, and their backup accounts.
The record before the court included a
May 6, 2021 White House email discussing the “disinfo dozen,”
platform demotion efforts, and reach mitigation. It included a platform record
identifying GreenMedInfo.com as an associated Disinformation Dozen
domain receiving a 60 percent reduction in distribution. And it
included a contrast that alone warrants scrutiny:
The list, the report, and the sentence that traveled with it.
CCDH’s March 2021 report named twelve individuals — including plaintiffs
Dr. Sherri Tenpenny and Dr. Ben Tapper — and urged platforms
to remove them, their organizations, and their backup accounts. On July 16, 2021,
President Biden was asked about the twelve. He said: “They’re killing
people.”
73%
Share of anti-vaccine content on Facebook the report attributed to the twelve
named — cited by the White House and U.S. Senators.
0.05%
Share a senior platform executive later stated the platform’s own data actually
showed — even as the named accounts and domains were penalized anyway.
The record also included allegations of individual account removals, restrictions,
domain penalties, payment-platform losses, reach reductions, canceled opportunities,
professional injury, and business damage affecting each plaintiff. Those documents
exist. What they mean — the full chain of who communicated, who decided, who acted,
and why — is exactly what discovery and oversight were needed to determine.
§ 02 The Foreign Intermediary
The list that named us was produced by a British organization.
Every American should understand who wrote the report that the White House and
U.S. senators cited to pressure platforms against us.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate — the organization that published
the “Disinformation Dozen” and expressly urged platforms to deplatform us — is a
British non-profit. CCDH Ltd. is
registered in England at 82 St John Street, London EC1M 4JN, company number
11633127, incorporated October 19, 2018. CCDH confirmed its own UK identity and structure
in
federal court filings: “Defendant CCDH UK is a non-profit organization formed under English law and
headquartered in London.” It also operates a smaller U.S. 501(c)(3) affiliate
(“CCDH US”), but the parent operation is British.
The First Amendment concern
A foreign non-profit — unaccountable to American voters, outside U.S.
transparency law, and outside U.S. campaign-finance and lobbying disclosure —
produced a private list of American citizens. That list then circulated to the
White House and to United States Senators, was cited by them publicly, and was
followed by platform-enforcement action against the named Americans. That
pipeline — foreign entity → U.S. government → U.S. platforms → named
Americans — is precisely the kind of arrangement that transparency,
oversight, and due process exist to test.
Congress has already recognized the seriousness of these questions. On
August 3, 2023, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan opened a formal censorship investigation
into CCDH, demanding every CCDH communication with the executive branch and social
media companies dating to January 2015 concerning “the moderation, deletion,
suppression, restriction, demonetization, or reduced circulation of content” — and
specifically including CCDH’s role in “the attribution of content to the source or
participant in a
foreign malign or state-sponsored influence operation.” The
subpoena follow-up went out on
November 7, 2024. That congressional record remains open.
We do not allege that CCDH is a state actor or a foreign intelligence operation. We
allege something narrower and more provable: that a private foreign organization
produced a named-target list of Americans, and that U.S. officials and U.S.
platforms treated that list as actionable — without transparent evidence, notice to
the named Americans, due process, or meaningful appeal.
First Amendment protections do not evaporate because the accuser is offshore. If
anything, they demand more scrutiny, not less: a British non-profit is not
accountable to the American electorate, not subject to FOIA, not required to
disclose its funders under U.S. campaign-finance law, and not answerable to any
U.S. inspector general. Every American, of every viewpoint, has a stake in whether
foreign-origin lists can be laundered through U.S. government channels into
domestic economic and digital punishment.
§ 03 Why This Case Matters, Historically
Every prior lawsuit sailed past the same reef.
Ours was supposed to be the one that landed.
Finn v. Global Engagement Center was not the first attempt to hold the
federal government accountable for pressuring platforms to censor Americans. It was
the one that was supposed to survive the doctrine that killed the others — by naming
plaintiffs who had been publicly identified in a deplatforming campaign, by
documenting specific injuries, and by pleading a chain that
Murthy v. Missouri’s standing test demanded. Then a procedural ruling
terminated it before any of that evidence could be tested.
The flagship jawboning case. Missouri and Louisiana, joined by five individual
plaintiffs, sued Biden-era federal officials, alleging the government coerced
platforms to suppress speech on COVID-19, elections, and other topics.
✓
July 4, 2023 — Preliminary injunction granted. Judge
Terry Doughty issued a sweeping injunction limiting federal officials’
communications with platforms about content moderation.
✓
Sept 8, 2023 — Fifth Circuit affirmed. The appeals court
upheld the injunction, holding that federal officials likely coerced
platforms in violation of the First Amendment.
✗
June 26, 2024 — Supreme Court reversed, 6–3. Justice
Barrett’s majority held that the plaintiffs
lacked Article III standing
to seek an injunction. To sue over government-induced censorship, the
Court said a plaintiff must show “that a particular defendant pressured
a particular platform to censor a particular topic before that platform
suppressed a particular plaintiff’s speech on that topic.” Justices
Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissented.
Why it didn’t protect Americans:Murthy did not decide whether the government’s pressure was
unconstitutional. It decided that private citizens — even those who could
point to platform actions against their accounts — could not, as a rule,
prove the internal chain of causation without discovery. That is
the doctrine every subsequent case has run into. It is the doctrine
Finn was crafted to survive.
2023Filed
Kennedy v. Biden
U.S.D.C., W.D. La. → Fifth Circuit (later merged into Missouri
proceedings on remand)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense, and journalist Connie Sampognaro
sued Biden-era officials on the same jawboning theory. After Murthy
came down, the case was remanded to consider standing under the new
framework.
✗
Nov 4, 2024 — Fifth Circuit affirmed dismissal.
Standing defect under Murthy. Rehearing petition denied in part;
case later
remanded to consider mootness
after Executive Order 14149.
2023Filed
Children’s Health Defense v. Meta / Facebook
U.S.D.C., N.D. Cal. → Ninth Circuit
CHD sued Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, and third-party “fact-checker” Science
Feedback alleging platform action against CHD’s accounts amounted to state
action under the First Amendment.
✗
Aug 9, 2024 — Ninth Circuit affirmed dismissal with prejudice.
The court held the alleged government involvement did not convert Meta’s
moderation into state action reachable under the First Amendment.
2022Filed
Changizi v. HHS
U.S.D.C., S.D. Ohio → Sixth Circuit
Scientists Mark Changizi, Michael Senger, and Daniel Kotzin sued HHS over
the Surgeon General’s misinformation initiative and the Twitter/Meta actions
they alleged flowed from it.
✗
2023 — Sixth Circuit affirmed dismissal. No Article III
standing. Cited later by the Solicitor General as the template the
Supreme Court should apply in Murthy.
2026Settled
The DOJ consent decrees — and their limits
Filed in W.D. La. and E.D. Tex., March–April 2026
After Executive Order 14149, the Trump-era Department of Justice settled
three of the remaining jawboning suits.
Missouri v. Biden — the
March 24, 2026 consent decree
bars the Surgeon General’s Office, the CDC, and CISA from threatening
social-media companies with legal, regulatory, or economic punishment to
induce takedowns of protected speech —
for 10 years. Only two plaintiffs (Jill Hines and Aaron
Kheriaty) were still in the case when it settled.
Children’s Health Defense v. Biden — settled the
same week.
Daily Wire v. State Department —April 2026 consent decree
bars the State Department — including the now-closed
Global Engagement Center, our named defendant — from
funding or promoting censorship technology or partnering with foreign
governments and NGOs for those purposes,
through 2036.
Why the consent decrees don’t protect anyone but the plaintiffs:
A consent decree binds the parties to the case. The plaintiffs get
forward-looking relief. Everyone else — including the Americans who were
actually named on the “Disinformation Dozen” list, penalized during that
era, and shut out of court by Murthy’s standing rule — gets
no records disclosed, no accounting, no admission of wrongdoing,
and no restoration of what was taken. Three federal agencies are on
a 10-year leash. The rest are not. And the injuries that predate the
settlement are, as a matter of law and practice, unremedied.
2023Filed
Finn v. Global Engagement Center — this case
U.S.D.C., M.D. Fla.
Six plaintiffs — each publicly named in the “Disinformation Dozen”
report and each documenting specific account, domain, business, and
payment-platform injuries — filed suit against the Global Engagement Center
and related actors. The complaint was designed for the post-Murthy
standing world: it identified named plaintiffs, named defendants, named
reports, named platform actions, and requested targeted discovery to
produce the internal chain.
✗
July 28, 2026 — Dismissed with prejudice, sua sponte.
Judge Wendy W. Berger dismissed the plaintiffs’ third amended
complaint as an impermissible “shotgun pleading,” without reaching
standing, without reaching the merits, and without permitting further
amendment. All pending defense motions were terminated. The evidence was
never tested.
The reason this case matters historically:
Every prior case failed on standing. Finn was the case that pled
standing under the exact rubric Murthy demanded — and was terminated
on a pleading-form issue before that showing could be tested. Between
Murthy’s doctrine and Finn’s procedural end, the door for
named targets is now effectively closed. Congress is the only branch left
with the power to open it.
The stakes, in one sentence
They did it to us —and they walked.
Every American is next
until Congress acts.
Which official, in which agency, communicated what, to which platform, about which
plaintiff, in connection with which moderation action.
2
The records aren’t yours.
They sit inside government agencies, tech companies, payment processors, and
intermediary organizations — internal correspondence, referral tickets, escalation
logs, dashboards, data-sharing arrangements.
3
Discovery is what would produce them.
The plaintiffs asked for targeted discovery. They asked for leave to amend. They
sought oral argument. The case was ended before discovery could begin.
Citizens alleging covert public-private censorship can be required to prove the hidden
internal chain before they are permitted access to the records that would
reveal it. That dynamic risks insulating from review the very evidence most capable of
confirming or disproving the allegations.
No American, of any viewpoint, should be comfortable with that.
§ 05 Why This Matters to Every American
The same machinery can be pointed at anyone — of any ideology.
This is not a partisan demand. The question is not whether Americans may disagree — they
must be free to disagree. The question is whether the government may use private
intermediaries, privileged access, official pressure, and hidden reporting systems to
convert disagreement into economic and digital punishment without
transparency, notice, or due process.
Journalists
Doctors
Researchers
Labor organizers
Parents
Religious believers
Political dissidents
Whistleblowers
Civil-rights advocates
The harms do not stay online. Loss of an audience becomes loss of
income. Loss of income becomes staff reductions, canceled opportunities, broken
business relationships, loss of payment services, damaged professional standing, and
fear that a searchable public label will follow someone into every future institution,
platform, or country. The damage does not end when a post is removed — for many, it
becomes a continuing condition of life.
§ 06 The Point of the Case
Twelve were made an example. Millions were censored.
The “Disinformation Dozen” list was not a ceiling. It was a template. A foreign
NGO chose twelve names to make the campaign legible — twelve faces to attach to
what was in fact a mass operation reaching
hundreds of millions of American accounts, posts, comments, and
reshares. The named twelve were the visible casualties. The rest of the
country was the unnamed one.
65%
Share of anti-vaccine content on major platforms CCDH itself claimed the
“Disinformation Dozen” generated — the metric it used to justify recommending
the deplatforming of
everyone who ever shared, echoed, or engaged with that content.
Millions
Ordinary Americans whose posts were removed, throttled, labeled, demonetized,
or deprioritized during the same period — for sharing the same information,
asking the same questions, or defending the same named individuals.
Zero
Records disclosed, agencies audited, actors named, or restorations granted to
the millions of Americans who were not on the list but were caught in the
downstream enforcement action.
This case is not really about twelve people. It never was. The twelve are the
documented Americans — the ones a British non-profit put in a public
report, the ones the White House and U.S. senators named out loud, the ones whose
accounts, businesses, and livelihoods were demonstrably impaired. What made those
twelve legally interesting is the same thing that makes them
morally insufficient as the endpoint of any reckoning: they are the
plaintiffs who can prove it. They stand in for the ones who cannot.
Every American whose post was removed, whose reach was throttled, whose account
was suspended, whose small business was demonetized, whose payment processor
dropped them, whose email newsletter was flagged, whose search results were
buried, or whose reply was quietly hidden during those years — they, too, were
part of this. And unlike the twelve, they got no notice, no naming, no report,
no litigation, no consent decree, no press release. They just got smaller.
And free speech is not a stand-alone right. It is the operating protocol of
every other freedom Americans still have.
01
Informed medical consent requires the freedom to hear,
discuss, and dissent from the majority medical position — or there is
no consent, only compliance.
02
Parental rights require the freedom to research, to ask, and
to say no in public — or parenthood is reduced to executing decisions made by
bureaucracies whose deliberations parents are barred from questioning.
03
Religious freedom requires the freedom to publish, teach,
and defend a moral view that the state finds inconvenient — or the First
Amendment’s religion clause is a museum exhibit, not a lived right.
04
Protection of children requires the freedom of parents,
physicians, and communities to speak plainly about what they observe — or
children become the constituency no one is legally permitted to advocate
for.
05
Every other right in the Constitution — assembly, petition,
the press, due process, equal protection, the vote itself — depends on the
ability to say, publicly, what is happening. Silence one, and the rest
become theater.
This is why Finn v. Global Engagement Center is not a private grievance
of six Americans and a former list of twelve. It is a test case for whether the
First Amendment protects every American — named or unnamed,
famous or unknown, agreed-with or disagreed-with — from having their
constitutional rights laundered away through foreign NGOs, private platforms,
and unaccountable back-channels.
We ask for a public accounting on behalf of the twelve who were named,
and on behalf of the millions who were not.
§ 07 The Words Have Been Said. Now Congress Must Codify Them.
Executive Order 14149 — a beginning, not an ending.
On January 20, 2025,
Executive Order 14149
declared that federal departments, agencies, officers, employees, and agents may
not act or use federal resources in a manner inconsistent with Americans’
constitutionally protected speech, and directed a review of prior federal conduct
involving the censorship of protected speech.
The Department of Justice has since settled several lawsuits alleging that
federal officials induced or coerced social-media companies to suppress disfavored
speech. Those matters are distinct from this case and are not adjudications of
these claims — and each consent decree binds only its parties.
An executive order can be rescinded by the next executive order. A consent decree
binds only the parties to it. Neither preserves the record for the millions of
Americans who were censored but never named, and neither creates the enforceable
private right of action that would let them seek relief in court.
Only Congress can do that.
This coalition is not asking the executive branch for more executive action. We
are asking Congress — the branch with the constitutional authority to legislate
enforceable civil-rights protections and the institutional obligation to hold
oversight hearings — to do what only Congress can do.
§ 08 Because the Courts Have Not Reached the Evidence
Congress must.
As Congress returns this September, the plaintiffs will transmit formal oversight
submissions to the committees of jurisdiction in the House and Senate. Those committees
are called to do four things.
01
Preserve and obtain the internal record.
Issue preservation demands and subpoenas to agencies, contractors, platforms,
payment processors, and intermediary organizations for all records involving named
targets — emails, chats, meeting notes, referral tickets, escalation logs,
dashboards, trusted-flagger submissions, data-sharing arrangements, and enforcement
records — and trace the chain of responsibility they reveal.
02
Audit government records systems touching First Amendment activity.
Determine whether agencies maintained records, dashboards, watchlists, or tracking
tools describing Americans’ exercise of First Amendment rights — and whether those
systems complied with the Privacy Act and other legal safeguards.
03
Hold public hearings.
Hear from named targets, former officials, agency personnel, platform employees,
whistleblowers, and civil-liberties advocates across ideological lines — and publish
comprehensive findings identifying the architecture, its legal authority or lack of
it, the Americans affected, and the corrective action required.
04
Enact enforceable safeguards.
Pass clear statutory prohibitions on government-induced censorship; transparency and
records-retention mandates; notice and appeal rights for affected speakers — and
a private right of action, so that the next American named on a
list does not face the Catch-22 these plaintiffs faced.
§ 09 Add Your Name. Add Your Story.
Twelve were named. Millions were silenced.
The record needs every one.
The plaintiffs’ case has been dismissed. The next step is a public record
— built by every American who was censored, throttled, deplatformed, demonetized,
or silenced during those years. Add your name to a formal letter to Congress, and
share what happened to you. Your story becomes part of the coalition’s testimony
when Congress holds hearings.
01
Sign the letter to Congress
A formal letter, delivered to the committees of jurisdiction in the House and
Senate, signed by every American who was censored through government pressure
on platforms. Your signature counts. Your ZIP code routes you to your
delegation.
Coming the week of Sept 8.
Signature-collection form arriving via our coalition partner
Stand for Health Freedom. In the meantime, use the Contact Congress tool below to reach your
delegation directly.
02
Share your censorship story
What was taken from you — an account, a livelihood, an audience, a payment
processor, a business relationship, a professional reputation. Your story
joins the coalition’s archive, becomes part of the public record, and helps
document that this was not a story about twelve people. It was a story about
millions.
Coming the week of Sept 8. Story-submission form arriving
via Stand for Health Freedom. In the meantime, you can email your story to
stories@restorethe1st.com
and it will be added to the archive when the intake form goes live.
Your data is treated as if it were evidence, because it may become evidence. We
collect only what is necessary to authenticate your signature and story, we do not
sell or share your information, and we retain it under the same standard we would
expect from a congressional oversight body. Corrections and deletions on request.
§ 10 What You Can Do — Today
Contact your Congress. One sentence.
Ask your representative and both of your senators to support public hearings, records
preservation, and enforceable safeguards for Americans censored through government
pressure on platforms.
We open the official contact pages for your U.S. House and Senate delegation. Your
ZIP is not stored or transmitted anywhere except to public congressional lookup
pages.
The message to copy
Dear Representative / Senator, I’m a constituent writing to ask you to support
public hearings, records preservation, and enforceable safeguards —
including a private right of action — for Americans censored through
government pressure on platforms.
The dismissal of Finn v. Global Engagement Center on procedural grounds
left the underlying evidence untested. Because the courts have not reached the
evidence, Congress must. Thank you.
If you were deplatformed, demonetized, labeled, throttled, or debanked after being
flagged or named — preserve everything now. Enforcement notices, emails,
screenshots, appeal records, payment records, dates. The full accounting must
include every named target, not just twelve.
§ 11 People, Not Profiles
The undersigned plaintiffs.
Before they were named in a report, they were people with lives and work built over
years — writers, physicians, researchers, educators, publishers, entrepreneurs, parents,
and community members. They built audiences one reader, viewer, patient, subscriber, and
conversation at a time.
Erin Elizabeth Finn
Lead plaintiff · Health Nut News
View profile →
Sayer Ji
Founder, GreenMedInfo
View profile →
Rizza Islam
International activist, author
View profile →
Dr. Christiane Northrup
Physician, author
View profile →
Dr. Ben Tapper
Chiropractor, health educator
View profile →
Dr. Sherri Tenpenny
Osteopathic physician, author
View profile →
We do not ask Americans to accept our allegations without evidence.
We ask that the evidence be preserved, disclosed, and tested.
The six of us went to court because we could. We went for the
millions who couldn’t.
Our case has been dismissed. Our demand for a public accounting has not.
§ 12 The Others Named
Twelve slots. Thirteen Americans. Six of us went to court.
The “Disinformation Dozen” report identified twelve slots on a single foreign-produced
list. Six of the Americans on that list are the plaintiffs in
Finn v. Global Engagement Center. The rest — doctors, publishers,
filmmakers, authors, community leaders — were named alongside us and lived through
the same platform actions, the same public attacks, and the same absence of due
process. One of them now leads the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Official U.S. government portrait, 2025. Public domain.
Slot #2 on the list · Sworn in Feb. 13, 2025
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
26th U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services
Environmental attorney, author, and founder of Children’s Health Defense. Named
by CCDH as the second individual on the “Disinformation Dozen” list in March
2021. Removed from Instagram that same year. Ran for U.S. President as a
Democrat, then as an independent, then endorsed the winning ticket. Confirmed
by the Senate on
February 13, 2025 by a vote of 52–48
and sworn in by Justice Neil Gorsuch that afternoon in the Oval Office.
Why this fact matters to the case: Kennedy’s Senate
confirmation vote occurred less than three weeks after President Trump signed
Executive Order 14149 (“Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal
Censorship”) — an order whose findings acknowledge that the federal government
“infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American
citizens.” One of the men whose speech that acknowledgement describes now
heads the Cabinet department most directly named in the underlying CCDH
deplatforming campaign. His appointment does not moot the plaintiffs’ claims;
if anything, it underscores that the harms the executive order describes were
inflicted on real, identifiable Americans — including one now serving in the
United States Cabinet.
None of the individuals below is a party to Finn v. Global Engagement
Center. Each was, however, publicly named on the same foreign-produced list
that named the plaintiffs, and each was subject to the platform actions that
followed. Their inclusion here is a matter of accurate historical record — not
legal representation.
Slot #1
Dr. Joseph Mercola
Osteopath, publisher of Mercola.com
Identified by CCDH as the leading “superspreader” of the twelve. Publisher of
one of the largest independent natural-health platforms in the U.S. Removed
from major social platforms following the report.
Documentary filmmakers behind The Truth About Cancer and
The Truth About Vaccines docuseries. Occupied a single “slot” on the
CCDH list as a married pair. Both experienced platform actions and public
deplatforming following the March 2021 report.
Osteopathic physician and author known for advocacy on chelation therapy and
integrative medicine. Removed from major platforms after the report. Died in
May 2023 at age 57 — named on the list, but no longer able to be heard on it.
Board-certified psychiatrist, NYU-trained, author of A Mind of Your
Own. Founder of the Vital Life membership community. Publicly identified
on the CCDH list and subject to platform actions across her professional
accounts.
Founder of the Urban Global Health Alliance and host of a long-running health
and civil-liberties podcast. Publicly named on the list and subject to platform
enforcement following the report.
Source of the list: Center for Countering Digital Hate,
The Disinformation Dozen, March 24, 2021 (PDF). Individual profiles above are compiled from public sources for accurate
historical record only; inclusion is not an endorsement of any individual’s views,
nor does it imply any party’s consent to be featured on this page.
§ 13 In Coalition
No one restores the First Amendment alone.
The plaintiffs are joined — and inviting more organizations to join — in the
work of restoring free speech, informed consent, parental rights, religious
freedom, and every other constitutional protection that depends on the ability
to speak plainly in public.
Listing here does not imply that any organization has endorsed the specific
legal claims of Finn v. Global Engagement Center. It reflects shared
work on the underlying constitutional principles. Organizations wishing to be
moved, added, or removed may email
coalition@restorethe1st.com.
