Breaking
October 16, 2026The congressman who votes no just said yes.
Rep. Thomas Massie has become the first cosponsor of the GRANITE Act, H.R. 10174, the federal bill to stop foreign governments from censoring Americans on American soil. He sits on the House Judiciary Committee, where the bill would get its hearing.
- 1cosponsor after 50 days
- 0on the Senate bill, S. 5478
- Jan 3when this Congress ends
§ A citizens’ coalition for the First Amendment
Who gets to decide
which voices you hear?
When the government pressures platforms to suppress lawful speech, every American loses the protection of the First Amendment — whatever your politics, whoever holds office.
Your rights should outlast whoever holds office.
A White House email asked Facebook how effectively it was reducing reach. A platform record lists a 60% distribution reduction for one named domain. Americans on the list sued to expose that pipeline; the case was dismissed on procedural grounds and the evidence was never heard. Millions more were never named at all. The records are now public. Congress can act.
New feature · The global front
The First Amendment is American. The fight for it is global.
Brussels fined X. London regulates American websites. Australia threatened an American lawyer with jail. How the UK “online safety” model travels in through STAR, KOSA and AI regulation, and what Congress can do about it.
Read the feature →What Restore the First is
Six programs. One First Amendment.
The Case
Finn v. Global Engagement Center — and what happened after.
The plaintiffs, the record, the case history, and the private-right-of-action doctrine the litigation turns on.
Read the case →The Coalition
A citizens’ coalition, of any viewpoint.
Who we are, the coalition roster, the founder, and how to join, endorse, or write about the work.
Meet the coalition →Policy
Seven pillars, three federal bills.
The policy blueprint, the JAWBONE Act (S.4749), the First Amendment Remedies Act, and the GRANITE Act.
Read the blueprint →Features
Five feature sections. One argument.
The Licensed Press. The Fifth Estate. Foreign Censorship. Lawfare. Vote for Health Freedom. Read them in any order.
Open Features →AI Rights
The live legislative front.
Five bills across two capitals, the investigation into the transatlantic pipeline behind them, and the sixteen-event timeline.
Track the bills →News
The coalition’s newsroom.
Every essay, statement, and update the coalition has published since the launch on September 12, 2026.
Open News →The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’
§ 01 What happened — and to whom
Twelve were made an example.
Millions were censored.
In 2021 a British non-profit published a list of twelve Americans and urged platforms to remove them. The White House and U.S. senators cited it while pressuring platforms to act. The list was not a ceiling. It was a template — twelve faces attached to an enforcement wave that reached 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.
Distribution reduction a platform record lists for a single named domain — one line in a file that governed what millions of Americans were allowed to see. Platform records →
Ordinary Americans whose posts were removed, throttled, labeled, demonetized, or deprioritized in the same period — for sharing the same information, asking the same questions, or defending the same named people. No notice. No hearing. No name.
Records disclosed, agencies audited, officials named, or accounts restored for the Americans who were never on the list but were caught in the enforcement action downstream.
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 newsletter was flagged, whose search results were buried, or whose reply was quietly hidden during those years — they were part of this. They got no report, no press release, no day in court. They just got smaller.
The people on the list could prove it, and they sued. In July 2026 a federal court dismissed Finn v. Global Engagement Center on procedural grounds without ever reaching the evidence. That evidence — the White House emails, the platform files, the internal enforcement records — is now public. Anyone can read it.
§ 02 In their own words
This is not an allegation. It is the public record.
Every line below is a direct quotation from a government email, a federal court, or the platform that did the removing. Each links to its source.
“We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy — period.”
“They’re killing people.”
“If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
“What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive.”
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire… I believe the government pressure was wrong.”
The Supreme Court did not decide whether any of this was lawful. In Murthy it held the challengers lacked standing. In Finn the district court never reached the evidence. The question every American is owed an answer to remains open.
§ 03 And there is no remedy
If this happens to you, there is no court to go to.
Not because you are wrong. Because of three doors that have closed, one after another.
You must name the chain — with precision.
Which official, in which agency, said what, to which platform, about you, in connection with which removal. Before you see a single document.
The records aren’t yours.
They sit inside agencies, platforms, payment processors, and intermediary organizations — referral tickets, escalation logs, dashboards, data-sharing arrangements. Only discovery or a subpoena produces them.
The courts have closed the door.
Murthy (2024): no standing. Egbert (2022): no damages against federal officers for First Amendment retaliation. Finn (2026): dismissed before discovery. An American silenced through federal pressure on a platform has, in practice, no remedy against the official responsible.
Citizens can be required to prove the hidden chain before they are allowed to see the records that would reveal it. Congress can fix this in one statute. No American, of any viewpoint, should be comfortable with the alternative.
§ 04 Why this is everyone’s fight
Free speech is not the fight. It is every fight.
Congress shall make no law — the phrase from which the First Amendment begins — is followed by five guarantees. Every cause Americans care about runs through one of them, and all five now run through a sixth: the platform and AI layer where speech actually happens. Weaken one, and the rest become theater.
- Religion Free exercise, without government leverage on the faithful.
- Speech No suppression by proxy through private intermediaries.
- Press Independent outlets protected from state-directed deplatforming.
- Assembly The right to organize, online and off.
- Petition The right to be heard by government without retaliation.
- Speech infrastructure Access to the AI and platform layer where speech now happens — and who decides.
Informed medical consent, parental rights, religious liberty, a free press, the vote itself — each depends on the ability to say, publicly, what is happening. This is why the First Amendment is not one right among many. It is the operating protocol of every right you still have.
How this touches your life, cause by cause →§ 05 Because the courts have not reached the evidence
Congress must.
Three things. Each one is within Congress’s power today, and each one protects every American — of any viewpoint — the next time a list is drawn up.
-
01
Preserve the records.
Preservation demands and subpoenas to agencies, contractors, platforms, payment processors, and intermediary organizations — every email, referral ticket, escalation log, dashboard, and enforcement file — before they disappear.
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02
Hold public hearings.
Call the witnesses — officials, platform employees, whistleblowers, and Americans across the ideological spectrum who were silenced — on the record and under oath. Publish findings.
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03
Create enforceable protections.
An express private right of action when federal pressure suppresses protected speech, plus records-retention, notice, and appeal rights — so the next American on a list has a door to walk through. The First Amendment Remedies Act is our model text.
A requested law, not a promised outcome. Congress can create causes of action; it cannot override Article III. Full detail in the policy blueprint and the section-by-section of the bill.
§ 06 Act. Three steps, five minutes.
Stand with millions of Americans.
The record needs every one.
The courts have not reached the evidence, so the record has to be built in public — by every American who was censored, throttled, deplatformed, demonetized, or silenced. Three actions, all running through our coalition partner Stand for Health Freedom.
Tell your federal lawmakers
Tell your federal lawmakers to investigate COVID-era censorship, uncover the full record, and help ensure it never happens again. Your ZIP routes the message to your U.S. House and Senate delegation.
Widget not loading? Complete step 1 on SHF’s site →
Add your name to the list
Add your name to the growing list of Americans whose speech has been silenced. Every signature makes the case that this was never about twelve people. It was millions.
Widget not loading? Complete step 2 on SHF’s site →
Share your censorship story
Tell us your censorship story. Your experience can help expose the true scope of censorship in America and becomes part of the coalition’s testimony when Congress holds hearings.
Saw it from the inside — at an agency, platform, lab, or contractor? Come forward through the encrypted intake →
Widget not loading? Complete step 3 on SHF’s site → or email stories@restorethe1st.com.
Prefer one page for all three steps? Go to standforhealthfreedom.com/restore-the-first →
Prefer direct contact without a campaign form? Use the direct-contact tool below →
And the legislation to move right now.
§ 07 Direct contact — alternative path
Prefer direct contact? Skip the campaign form.
The three actions in § 06 run through Stand for Health Freedom’s VoterVoice platform. If you prefer to contact your representatives directly — without a campaign form, without an account, without your data leaving your browser — use this tool. Enter your ZIP; we open the official House and Senate contact pages for your delegation and hand you a one-sentence message to copy.
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.
§ 08 In coalition
No one restores the First Amendment alone.
Twenty organizations and eight independent outlets — national nonprofits, single-lawyer firms, and broadcasters — have joined a citizens’ coalition for every American, of any viewpoint, targeted for lawful speech. Every listing is on the record. Every partner keeps its independence.
Listing does not imply endorsement of any litigation. Every partner keeps its independence. Organizations wishing to be added, moved, or removed may email coalition@restorethe1st.com.