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MOODY v. NETCHOICE, LLC 

Syllabus 

court  held  that  the  obligation  to  explain  “millions  of  [decisions]  per 
day”  is  “unduly  burdensome  and  likely  to  chill  platforms’  protected
speech.”  34 F. 4th, at 1230. 

The  Fifth  Circuit  disagreed  across  the  board,  and  so  reversed  the 
preliminary injunction of the Texas law.  In that court’s view, the plat-
forms’ content-moderation activities are “not speech” at all, and so do
not implicate the First Amendment.  49 F. 4th 439, 466, 494.  But even 
if  those  activities  were  expressive,  the  court  determined  the  State
could regulate them to advance its interest in “protecting a diversity
of ideas.”  Id., at 482.  The court further held that the statute’s indi-
vidualized-explanation provisions would likely survive, even assuming
the platforms were engaged in speech.  It found no undue burden un-
der Zauderer because the platforms needed only to “scale up” a “com-
plaint-and-appeal process” they already used.  49 F. 4th, at 487. 

Held: The judgments are vacated, and the cases are remanded, because
neither the Eleventh Circuit nor the Fifth Circuit conducted a proper
analysis  of  the  facial  First  Amendment  challenges  to  Florida  and
Texas laws regulating large internet platforms.  Pp. 9–31. 

(a) NetChoice’s  decision  to  litigate  these  cases  as  facial  challenges 
comes at a cost.  The Court has made facial challenges hard to win.  In 
the First Amendment context, a plaintiff must show that “a substan-
tial number of [the law’s] applications are unconstitutional, judged in 
relation to the statute’s plainly legitimate sweep.”  Americans for Pros-
perity Foundation v. Bonta, 594 U. S. 595, 615. 

So far in these cases, no one has paid much attention to that issue. 
Analysis and arguments below focused mainly on how the laws applied
to the content-moderation practices that giant social-media platforms
use  on  their  best-known  services  to  filter,  alter,  or  label  their  users’ 
posts, i.e., on how the laws applied to the likes of Facebook’s News Feed
and YouTube’s homepage.  They did not address the full range of ac-
tivities the laws cover, and measure the constitutional against the un-
constitutional applications. 

The  proper  analysis  begins  with  an  assessment  of  the  state  laws’ 
scope.  The laws appear to apply beyond Facebook’s News Feed and its 
ilk.  But it’s not clear to what extent, if at all, they affect social-media
giants’ other services, like direct messaging, or what they have to say 
about other platforms and functions.  And before a court can do any-
thing else with these facial challenges, it must “determine what [the 
law] covers.”  United States v. Hansen, 599 U. S. 762, 770. 

The next order of business is to decide which of the laws’ applications
violate the First Amendment, and to measure them against the rest.
For the content-moderation provisions, that means asking, as to every 
covered  platform  or  function,  whether  there  is  an  intrusion  on  pro-