28
MOODY v. NETCHOICE, LLC
Opinion of the Court
dangers to free expression, there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors in order to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana. That is why we have said in so many contexts that
the government may not “restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice
of others.” Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1, 48–49 (1976) (per
curiam). That unadorned interest is not “unrelated to the
suppression of free expression,” and the government may
not pursue it consistent with the First Amendment.
The Court’s decisions about editorial control, as discussed
earlier, make that point repeatedly. See supra, at 18–19.
Again, the question those cases had in common was
whether the government could force a private speaker, including a compiler and curator of third-party speech, to convey views it disapproved. And in most of those cases, the
government defended its regulation as yielding greater balance in the marketplace of ideas. But the Court—in
Tornillo, in PG&E, and again in Hurley—held that such an
interest could not support the government’s effort to alter
the speaker’s own expression. “Our cases establish,” the
PG&E Court wrote, “that the State cannot advance some
points of view by burdening the expression of others.” 475
U. S., at 20. So the newspaper, the public utility, the parade organizer—whether acting “fair[ly] or unfair[ly]”—
could exclude the unwanted message, free from government
interference. Tornillo, 418 U. S., at 258; see United States
Telecom Assn. v. FCC, 855 F. 3d 381, 432 (CADC 2017) (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc)
(“[E]xcept in rare circumstances, the First Amendment
does not allow the Government to regulate the content
choices of private editors just so that the Government may
enhance certain voices and alter the content available to the
citizenry”).10
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10 Texas claims Turner as a counter-example, but that decision offers