Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-277_d18f.pdf
Page Number: 31

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

25 

Opinion of the Court 

almost  9  million  pieces  of  “bullying  and  harassment  con-
tent.”  App. in No. 22–555, at 80a.  Similarly, YouTube de-
leted in one quarter more than 6 million videos violating its
Guidelines.  See id., at 116a.  And among those are the re-
movals the Texas law targets.  What is more, this Court has 
already rightly declined to focus on the ratio of rejected to 
accepted content.  Recall that in Hurley, the parade organ-
izers welcomed pretty much everyone, excluding only those
who  expressed  a  message  of  gay  pride.    See  supra,  at  18. 
The  Court  held  that  the  organizers’  “lenient”  admissions
policy—and their resulting failure to express a “particular-
ized message”—did “not forfeit” their right to reject the few 
messages  they  found  harmful  or  offensive.    515  U. S.,  at 
569, 574.  So too here, though the excluded viewpoints dif-
fer.  That  Facebook  and  YouTube  convey  a  mass  of  mes-
sages does not license Texas to prohibit them from deleting 
posts with, say, “hate speech” based on “sexual orientation.” 
App. in No. 22–555, at 126a, 155a; see id., at 431a.  It is as 
much an editorial choice to convey all speech except in se-
lect categories as to convey only speech within them. 

Similarly,  the  major  social-media  platforms  do  not  lose 
their First Amendment protection just because no one will 
wrongly attribute to them the views in an individual post.
Contra, 49 F. 4th, at 462 (arguing otherwise).  For starters, 
users may well attribute to the platforms the messages that
the posts convey in toto.  Those messages—communicated
by the feeds as a whole—derive largely from the platforms’ 
editorial  decisions  about  which  posts  to  remove,  label,  or 
demote.  And because that is so, the platforms may indeed 
“own” the overall speech environment.  In any event, this
Court has never hinged a compiler’s First Amendment pro-
tection  on  the  risk  of  misattribution.    The  Court  did  not 
think in Turner—and could not have thought in Tornillo or 
PG&E—that  anyone  would  view  the  entity  conveying  the
third-party  speech  at  issue  as  endorsing  its  content.    See 
Turner I, 512 U. S., at 655 (“[T]here appears little risk” of