Cite as: 603 U. S. ____ (2024)
11
Opinion of the Court
do the laws have to say, if anything, about how an email
provider like Gmail filters incoming messages, how an
online marketplace like Etsy displays customer reviews,
how a payment service like Venmo manages friends’ financial exchanges, or how a ride-sharing service like Uber
runs? See Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 22–277, at 74–79, 95–98;
see also id., at 153 (Solicitor General) (“I have some sympathy [for the Court] here. In preparation for this argument,
I’ve been working with my team to say, does this even cover
direct messaging? Does this even cover Gmail?”). Those
are examples only. The online world is variegated and complex, encompassing an ever-growing number of apps, services, functionalities, and methods for communication and
connection. Each might (or might not) have to change because of the provisions, as to either content moderation or
individualized explanation, in Florida’s or Texas’s law. Before a court can do anything else with these facial challenges, it must address that set of issues—in short, must
“determine what [the law] covers.” Hansen, 599 U. S., at
770.
The next order of business is to decide which of the laws’
applications violate the First Amendment, and to measure
them against the rest. For the content-moderation provisions, that means asking, as to every covered platform or
function, whether there is an intrusion on protected
editorial discretion. See infra, at 13–19. And for the
individualized-explanation provisions, it means asking,
again as to each thing covered, whether the required disclosures unduly burden expression. See Zauderer, 471 U. S.,
at 651. Even on a preliminary record, it is not hard to see
how the answers might differ as between regulation of Facebook’s News Feed (considered in the courts below) and,
say, its direct messaging service (not so considered). Curating a feed and transmitting direct messages, one might
think, involve different levels of editorial choice, so that the
one creates an expressive product and the other does not.