46 CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N Opinion of the Court 3 The Government contends further that corporate inde pendent expenditures can be limited because of its interest in protecting dissenting shareholders from being com pelled to fund corporate political speech. This asserted interest, like Austin’s antidistortion rationale, would allow the Government to ban the political speech even of media corporations. See supra, at 35–37. Assume, for example, that a shareholder of a corporation that owns a newspaper disagrees with the political views the newspaper ex presses. See Austin, 494 U. S., at 687 (SCALIA, J., dissent ing). Under the Government’s view, that potential dis agreement could give the Government the authority to restrict the media corporation’s political speech. The First Amendment does not allow that power. There is, further more, little evidence of abuse that cannot be corrected by shareholders “through the procedures of corporate democ racy.” Bellotti, 435 U. S., at 794; see id., at 794, n. 34. Those reasons are sufficient to reject this shareholder protection interest; and, moreover, the statute is both underinclusive and overinclusive. As to the first, if Con gress had been seeking to protect dissenting shareholders, it would not have banned corporate speech in only certain media within 30 or 60 days before an election. A dissent ing shareholder’s interests would be implicated by speech in any media at any time. As to the second, the statute is overinclusive because it covers all corporations, including nonprofit corporations and for-profit corporations with only single shareholders. As to other corporations, the remedy is not to restrict speech but to consider and ex plore other regulatory mechanisms. The regulatory mechanism here, based on speech, contravenes the First Amendment. 4 We need not reach the question whether the Govern