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Page Number: 10.0

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MOODY v. NETCHOICE, LLC 

Opinion of the Court 

brought under the First Amendment.  As explained below, 
the question in such a case is whether a law’s unconstitu-
tional applications are substantial compared to its constitu-
tional  ones.    To  make  that  judgment,  a  court  must  deter-
mine  a  law’s  full  set  of  applications,  evaluate  which  are
constitutional and which are not, and compare the one to 
the other.  Neither court performed that necessary inquiry.
To do that right, of course, a court must understand what 
kind of government actions the First Amendment prohibits.
We therefore set out the relevant constitutional principles,
and explain how one of the Courts of Appeals failed to follow 
them.  Contrary to what the Fifth Circuit thought, the cur-
rent  record  indicates  that  the  Texas  law  does  regulate
speech when applied in the way the parties focused on be-
low—when  applied,  that  is,  to  prevent  Facebook  (or
YouTube)  from  using  its  content-moderation  standards  to
remove, alter, organize, prioritize, or disclaim posts in its
News Feed (or homepage).  The law then prevents exactly 
the  kind  of  editorial  judgments  this  Court  has  previously
held to receive First Amendment protection.  It prevents a
platform from compiling the third-party speech it wants in
the  way  it  wants,  and  thus  from  offering  the  expressive
product that most reflects its own views and priorities.  Still 
more,  the  law—again,  in  that  specific  application—is  un-
likely to withstand First Amendment scrutiny.  Texas has 
thus far justified the law as necessary to balance the mix of
speech on Facebook’s News Feed and similar platforms; and 
the  record  reflects  that  Texas  officials  passed  it  because 
they  thought  those  feeds  skewed  against  politically  con-
servative  voices.    But this  Court  has  many  times  held,  in 
many  contexts,  that  it  is  no  job  for  government  to  decide
what counts as the right balance of private expression—to
“un-bias” what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such 
judgments to speakers and their audiences.  That principle
works for social-media platforms as it does for others. 

In  sum,  there  is  much  work  to  do  below  on  both  these