Moody v. NetChoice, 603 U.S 2024 (U.S. Supreme Court, July 1, 2024) (Kagan, J.)
Today, we consider whether two state laws regulating social media platforms and other websites facially violate the First Amendment. The laws, from Florida and Texas, restrict the ability of social-media platforms to control whether and how third-party posts are presented to other users. Or otherwise put, the laws limit the platforms’ capacity to engage in content moderation—to filter, prioritize, and label the varied messages, videos, and other content their users wish to post. In addition, though far less addressed in this Court, the laws require a platform to provide an individualized explanation to a user if it removes or alters her posts. NetChoice, an internet trade association, challenged both laws on their face—as a whole, rather than as to particular applications. The cases come to us at an early stage, on review of preliminary injunctions. The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld such an injunction, finding that the Florida law was not likely to survive First Amendment review. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed a similar injunction, primarily reasoning that the Texas law does not regulate any speech and so does not implicate the First Amendment.
We vacate both decisions for reasons separate from the First Amendment merits, because neither Court of Appeals properly considered the facial nature of NetChoice’s challenge. The courts mainly addressed what the parties had focused on. And the parties mainly argued these cases as if the laws applied only to the curated feeds offered by the largest and most paradigmatic social-media platforms—as if, say, each case presented an as-applied challenge brought by Facebook protesting its loss of control over the content of its News Feed. But argument in this Court revealed that the laws might apply to, and differently affect, other kinds of websites and apps. In a facial challenge, that could well matter, even when the challenge is brought under the First Amendment. As explained below, the question in such a case is whether a law’s unconstitutional applications are substantial compared to its constitutional ones. To make that judgment, a court must determine 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 succeed on its First Amendment claim, NetChoice must show that the law at issue (whether from Texas or from Florida) “prohibits a substantial amount of protected speech relative to its plainly legitimate sweep.” Hansen, 599 U. S., at 770. None of the parties below focused on that issue; nor did the Fifth or Eleventh Circuits. But that choice, unanimous as it has been, cannot now control. Even in the First Amendment context, facial challenges are disfavored, and neither parties nor courts can disregard the requisite inquiry into how a law works in all of its applications. So on remand, each court must evaluate the full scope of the law’s coverage. It must then decide which of the law’s applications are constitutionally permissible and which are not and finally weigh the one against the other. The need for NetChoice to carry its burden on those issues is the price of its decision to challenge the laws as a whole.