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Page Number: 32

26 

MOODY v. NETCHOICE, LLC 

Opinion of the Court 

such misattribution).  Yet all those entities, the Court held, 
were entitled to First Amendment protection for refusing to 
carry  the  speech.    See  supra,  at  14–16.    To  be  sure,  the 
Court  noted  in  PruneYard  and  FAIR,  when  denying  such 
protection, that there was little prospect of misattribution. 
See 447 U. S., at 87; 547 U. S., at 65.  But the key fact in
those cases, as noted above, was that the host of the third-
party speech was not itself engaged in expression.  See su-
pra, at 16–17.  The current record suggests the opposite as
to Facebook’s News Feed and YouTube’s homepage.  When 
the platforms use their Standards and Guidelines to decide
which third-party content those feeds will display, or how 
the display will be ordered and organized, they are making
expressive choices.  And because that is true, they receive
First Amendment protection. 

C 

And once that much is decided, the interest Texas relies 
on cannot sustain its law.  In the usual First Amendment 
case, we must decide whether to apply strict or intermedi-
ate scrutiny.  But here we need not.  Even assuming that 
the less stringent form of First Amendment review applies,
Texas’s law does not pass.  Under that standard, a law must 
further a “substantial governmental interest” that is “unre-
lated to the suppression of free expression.”  United States 
v. O’Brien, 391 U. S. 367, 377 (1968).  Many possible inter-
ests relating to social media can meet that test; nothing said
here puts regulation of NetChoice’s members off-limits as
to  a  whole  array  of  subjects.    But  the  interest  Texas  has 
asserted cannot carry the day: It is very much related to the 
suppression of free expression, and it is not valid, let alone 
substantial. 

Texas  has  never  been  shy,  and  always  been  consistent, 
about  its  interest:  The  objective  is  to  correct  the  mix  of 
speech that the major social-media platforms present.  In 
this Court, Texas described its law as “respond[ing]” to the