Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-277_d18f.pdf
Page Number: 93

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

31 

ALITO, J., concurring in judgment 

No human being could possibly review even a tiny frac-
tion of this gigantic outpouring of speech, and it is therefore 
hard  to  see  how  any  shared  message  could  be  discerned.
And even if someone could view all this data and find such 
a  message,  how  likely  is  it  that  the  addition  of  a  small 
amount of discordant speech would change the overall mes-
sage?

Now  consider  how  newspapers  and  social-media  plat-
forms edit content.  Newspaper editors are real human be-
ings, and when the Court decided Tornillo (the case that the 
majority finds most instructive), editors assigned articles to
particular reporters, and copyeditors went over typescript
with a blue pencil.  The platforms, by contrast, play no role 
in selecting the billions of texts and videos that users try to 
convey to each other.  And the vast bulk of the “curation” 
and  “content  moderation”  carried  out  by  platforms  is  not 
done by human beings.  Instead, algorithms remove a small 
fraction of nonconforming posts post hoc and prioritize con-
tent based on factors that the platforms have not revealed 
and may not even know.  After all, many of the biggest plat-
forms are beginning to use AI algorithms to help them mod-
erate  content.  And  when  AI  algorithms  make  a  decision,
“even  the  researchers  and  programmers  creating  them
don’t  really  understand  why  the  models  they  have  built
make  the  decisions  they  make.”56   Are  such  decisions 
equally  expressive  as  the  decisions  made  by  humans?
Should we at least think about this? 

Other questions abound.  Maybe we should think about
the enormous power exercised by platforms like Facebook 
and YouTube as a result of “network effects.”  Cf.  Ohio v. 

—————— 
about 150,000 words.  A typical word consists of 10 to 20 bytes.  There-
fore, the average issue of the New York Times contains around 3 million 
bytes. 

56 T.  Xu,  AI  Makes  Decisions  We  Don’t  Understand—That’s  a  Pro- 
blem,  (Jul.  19,  2021),  https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-right-
explanation.