Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-277_d18f.pdf
Page Number: 35.0

Cite as:  603 U. S. ____ (2024) 

29 

Opinion of the Court 

The case here is no different.  The interest Texas asserts 
is in changing the balance of speech on the major platforms’ 
feeds, so that messages now excluded will be included.  To 
describe that interest, the State borrows language from this
Court’s First Amendment cases, maintaining that it is pre-
venting “viewpoint discrimination.”  Brief for Texas 19; see 
supra, at 26–27.  But the Court uses that language to say 
what governments cannot do: They cannot prohibit private 
actors  from  expressing  certain  views.    When  Texas  uses 
that  language,  it  is  to  say  what  private  actors  cannot  do: 
They  cannot  decide  for  themselves  what  views  to  convey.
The innocent-sounding phrase does not redeem the prohib-
ited  goal.  The  reason  Texas  is  regulating  the  content-
moderation policies that the major platforms use for their
feeds is to change the speech that will be displayed there. 
Texas does not like the way those platforms are selecting 
and moderating content, and wants them to create a differ-
ent  expressive  product,  communicating  different  values
and priorities.  But under the First Amendment, that is a 
preference Texas may not impose. 

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no help to speak of.  Turner did indeed hold that the FCC’s must-carry
provisions, requiring cable operators to give some of their channel space
to local broadcast stations, passed First Amendment muster.  See supra, 
at  15.  But  the  interest  there  advanced  was  not  to  balance  expressive
content; rather, the interest was to save the local-broadcast industry, so
that it could continue to serve households without cable.  That interest, 
the Court explained, was “unrelated to the content of expression” dissem-
inated  by  either cable  or  broadcast  speakers.  Turner  I,  512  U. S.  622, 
647 (1994).  And later, the Hurley Court again noted the difference.  It 
understood the Government interest in Turner as one relating to compe-
tition policy: The FCC needed to limit the cable operators’ “monopolistic,” 
gatekeeping position “in order to allow for the survival of broadcasters.”
515 U. S., at 577.  Unlike in regulating the parade—or here in regulating 
Facebook’s News Feed or YouTube’s homepage—the Government’s inter-
est was “not the alteration of speech.”  Ibid.  And when that is so, the 
prospects of permissible regulation are entirely different.