U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of Texas isn’t a household name, but he’s ended up ruling on important legal cases that affect the whole nation.

And that's not by accident.

The reason he’s been the judge presiding over numerous important federal cases is because he’s the focus of what is called “judge shopping.”

Judge shopping — different from “forum shopping,” which is when a lawyer is trying to get a case heard in a jurisdiction where they think they might get a favorable result — is the act of filing lawsuits in typically smaller geographic areas led by particular judges in hopes of getting a favorable result.

This seemingly happened with Kacsmaryk in the mifepristone abortion pill case, where he last month ordered a hold on federal approval of the drug. Judge shopping also was arguably performed by former President Donald Trump in the classified documents case where Trump was trying to delay the legal proceedings as the Justice Department investigated him taking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, his post-presidential home in Florida.

Kacsmaryk, widely regarded as a conservative ideologue, became a federal judge in 2019 after then-President Trump nominated him in 2017.

Judge shopping is quite easy to do with Kacsmaryk because the vast majority of cases filed in his Northern District of Texas subdivision in Amarillo go to him.

“The Judge Kacsmaryk case is interesting because you’re basically assured you’ll get him,” says Jessica Levinson, a professor of law at Loyola Marymount University.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, a Trump nominee who last year made a favorable — and controversial — ruling that favored Trump, is another prime example, Levinson said.

Kacsmaryk’s office did not reply to a request for comment.

Plaintiffs can’t just file with Kacsmaryk because they want to. They must have a reason to be filing with him, such as they live in Texas or are an organization that operates in Texas. In the mifepristone case, some argue that the plaintiff, The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, made sure they had the ability to file with Kacsmaryk specifically by incorporating within his subdistrict only months before the lawsuit was filed.

“You see an advocacy organization incorporating in Texas, and I can’t imagine any other reason why they’d do that other than for the express purpose of getting in front of Judge Kacsmaryk,” says Alan Trammell, an associate professor of law at Washington and Lee University.

Potential ‘judge shopping’ pushback

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) has introduced a bill to push back against this practice of judge shopping.

The bill would make it so any civil lawsuit that would lead to what’s called a “nationwide injunction” — a ruling would affect the whole nation — would have to be heard by the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

If that was what had happened in the mifepristone case, for example, then Kacsmaryk would not have ruled on the case at the federal district court level.

“Activist plaintiffs should not be able to hand-pick individual judges to set nationwide policy, which is why it’s critical we address the issue of judge shopping in our federal courts,” Hirono said in a statement.U.S. Sen. U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI), wearing a face mask with drawings of late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images

It’s early, but so far, however, Hirono’s bill has not yet attracted a co-sponsor or received a hearing date.

Nationwide injunctions have become more common in recent years, Levinson said, and Trump was very effective at getting ideological judges, who will issue these kinds of rulings, placed on the federal bench. Levinson says the conservative legal movement seems to see this as a time to achieve as many of its goals as it can now that there are so many judges on the federal courts that are sympathetic to those goals.

“This is the moment. If you’re a conservative, I don’t know if it’s going to get better than this,” Levinson says. “This crop of conservative justices is just so much more conservative than anything that we’ve really seen in the past 75 or 100 years.”

Trump installed so many judges that a plaintiff might not even have to work very hard to get the desired result when filing this kind of suit, Trammell says, because there are now so many “zealots” on the federal bench. He says you could get a favorable ruling with “dumb luck” because of that.

Evan Caminker, a professor of law at the University of Michigan, says he thinks Hirono’s bill would likely “minimize judge-shopping for national injunctions,” because these kinds of cases would all end up before the same district court in Washington, D.C.

That said, he can imagine conservatives might feel such a change would be too beneficial for liberals.

“I suspect some will oppose the bill simply because there happens to be a slight majority of Democratic-appointed judges in D.C. on both the trial and appellate levels, though of course that will change over time,” Caminker says.

Alternatively, Caminker says some have proposed sending these kinds of cases to a random district court. That would also be effective because the plaintiffs filing the lawsuit would have no idea where it was going to be heard.

Regardless of what happens with Hirono’s bill, it is clear the conservative legal movement has gone into hyperdrive trying to craft lawsuits and model legislation to accomplish their goals through courts.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s own judicial nominees are back on track after long delays caused by the extended health-related absence of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), whose vote was required on the Senate Judiciary Committee to advance the nominees.

Liberals consider it essential that Biden appoint as many left-leaning judges as possible between now and the 2024 election, when Democrats control both the White House and Senate.

Political disinformation and misinformation spreading rapidly on social media sites has become a major problem over the past four years. While it affects people on both sides of the aisle, it's primarily been a force for radicalizing conservatives. From the alt-right in 2016 to QAnon in 2020, a lack of trust in our democratic institutions, Americans' lack of media literacy and the failures of the platforms themselves have caused countless conservatives around the country to adopt more extremist and conspiratorial views.

Facebook recently banned QAnon groups from its platform, but as many have noted, these kinds of bans are only so effective. Users often simply become better at camouflaging what they're doing. If we're going to seriously take on the political disinformation problem, we cannot rely on platforms like Facebook to self-police. We're going to need a solution from Washington rather than Silicon Valley.

Algorithms and consumer protection

David Carroll, an associate professor of media design at the Parsons School of Design and one of the subjects of the documentary on Cambridge Analytica called The Great Hack, tells AlterNet that we need to stop focusing so much on cleaning up disinformation and start focusing on how it's become so powerful.

"There's no strategic or systemic attempt to get at the root of the radicalizing effect of personal data feeding into algorithms, feeding into a business model and juicing engagement at all costs," Carroll says. "Facebook banning QAnon is part of its reckoning. It was a thing on the chan board fringe that was mainstreamed on Facebook through the recommendation engine—algorithms and group recommending—so I think making the companies accountable to product safety and deceptive practices is probably a better strategy."

Any solution to this problem must avoid trampling on free speech. Even when Facebook and Twitter recently took action to avoid the spread of a New York Post article on Hunter Biden's emails that contained personal email addresses and phone numbers—and which many have called Russian disinformation--Republicans claimed the platforms were censoring content to help Joe Biden win the election. There are ways we can address this issue without people worrying about tech companies intervening in the free flow of ideas.

Carroll says the goal should be keeping people from being radicalized in the first place and making sure social media companies can be held accountable when their platforms are causing harm to society. If Biden wins in November, the new administration and administration and Congress should come together and pass legislation that will force companies like Facebook to reveal to the public how their algorithms work and what personal data are being fed into them.

"Once you give people rights to their data and protection of their data, that creates the basis to then make algorithms more accountable, which then makes companies more accountable for products that they have liability for. Then they have more incentive to make them safe or take them off of the market if they're unsafe," Carroll says.

As things stand, the algorithms and recommendation engines that power social media platforms like Facebook operate in the shadows. That makes it difficult to identify exactly how Facebook's rabbit holes lead people to conspiracism and extremism. If these companies were forced to be more transparent and allow users to understand how they're being influenced, that could have a major effect on the spread of disinformation and allow us to more specifically point out ways Facebook is failing the public.

"I think it comes down to mandating explainability—meaning you have to be able to explain how the algorithm is working so that accusations of radicalization can be authoritatively sussed out, which will force companies to design the product so they can't be accused of radicalizing," Carroll says. "Right now, there's no mechanism to hold the company accountable."

Carroll believes that when people know why they're being pushed in a certain direction politically, such as why they're receiving the Facebook group recommendations they're receiving, then they'll be less likely to be sucked into a toxic spiral. Recent reporting from Britain's Channel 4 found that black voters who were shown that they were being targeted by the Trump campaign in 2016 and pushed not to vote wanted to vote even more. Even Trump supporters were disturbed by how they had been targeted.

Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes and the current managing editor of Truth or Fiction, tells AlterNet that she would get rid of the algorithm entirely.

"That's not organic spread," she says. "They are still invisibly manipulating the conversation—or at least trying to."

Treating Facebook like Big Tobacco

Carroll says we need to start thinking about companies like Facebook the way we think about Big Tobacco, alcohol companies or car companies. He says there are limits to how those industries can market their product and what products they can sell. Car companies adhere to strict safety rules and regulations that have dramatically reduced highway fatalities and pedestrian fatalities, but those companies are still able to "innovate and thrive," he says.

"There are plenty of examples where we have succeeded at that—letting industries thrive while also regulating them for safety," Carroll says. "Algorithms are just the next frontier of that."

To take the Big Tobacco analogy further, both Carroll and Binkowski believe Facebook should be held responsible for educating the public in the way cigarette companies were forced to educate the public about the dangers of smoking after the Master Settlement Agreement.

"The ad tech industry eroded the profitability of local news, local journalism. Local newspapers have become an endangered species, which harms local communities," Carroll says. "This contributes to the decline in trust in media, so I see these as systemic problems, and systemic solutions need to be considered."

Binkowski says she thinks lawmakers should force Facebook to dedicate funding to newsrooms "in perpetuity." She says this funding should be distributed transparently and overseen by a board of journalists and academics.

"That funding program should be global, not national. They need to be compelled to return to the world what they took from it," Binkowski says. "They need to pay journalists our fair share. They sucked up all the funds from what we made, what we created, the content that we risk our lives regularly putting together, generally for a salary that would shock non-journalists if they knew it."

Carroll says there's no "silver bullet" for fixing the disinformation problem, but creating a system that has more transparency, accountability and enforcement is key. It's also important to force these companies to repair the damage they've done, which may include forcing them to fund newsrooms. Disinformation will always find its place on the internet, as it's very difficult to combat effectively, but if we can get to the root of the problem and make it less potent, then we can start moving in the right direction and create a less chaotic and harmful information ecosystem.