14
MOODY v. NETCHOICE, LLC
Opinion of the Court
discard or downplay. The platforms object that the law thus
forces them to alter the content of their expression—a particular edited compilation of third-party speech. See Brief
for NetChoice in No. 22–555, pp. 18–34. That controversy
sounds a familiar note. We have repeatedly faced the question whether ordering a party to provide a forum for someone else’s views implicates the First Amendment. And we
have repeatedly held that it does so if, though only if, the
regulated party is engaged in its own expressive activity,
which the mandated access would alter or disrupt. So too
we have held, when applying that principle, that expressive
activity includes presenting a curated compilation of speech
originally created by others. A review of the relevant precedents will help resolve the question here.
The seminal case is Miami Herald Publishing Co. v.
Tornillo, 418 U. S. 241 (1974). There, a Florida law required a newspaper to give a political candidate a right to
reply when it published “criticism and attacks on his record.” Id., at 243. The Court held the law to violate the First
Amendment because it interfered with the newspaper’s “exercise of editorial control and judgment.” Id., at 258. Forcing the paper to print what “it would not otherwise print,”
the Court explained, “intru[ded] into the function of editors.” Id., at 256, 258. For that function was, first and foremost, to make decisions about the “content of the paper”
and “[t]he choice of material to go into” it. Id., at 258. In
protecting that right of editorial control, the Court recognized a possible downside. It noted the access advocates’
view (similar to the States’ view here) that “modern media
empires” had gained ever greater capacity to “shape” and
even “manipulate popular opinion.” Id., at 249–250. And
the Court expressed some sympathy with that diagnosis.
See id., at 254. But the cure proposed, it concluded, collided
with the First Amendment’s antipathy to state manipulation of the speech market. Florida, the Court explained,