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The Global Climate Strike scheduled for this Friday will see hundreds of thousands of school children and their supporters take to the streets around the world to “demand an end to the age of fossil fuels and climate justice for everyone.” One especially big rally will be in New York City, where the United Nations is convening a Climate Action Summit of world leaders the following week. At the summit, countries are expected to ramp up their ambitions to curb their greenhouse gas emissions under the 2015 Paris climate agreement

New York City will allow its 1.1 million public school students to skip classes to participate in the protests, and scores of businesses have announced that they will be closed so that their employees can join in. At the moment, there are at least 800 strikes planned across all 50 states and people in 150 countries are planning to participate. The Climate Strikers acknowledge that “these Climate Strikes won’t solve the climate crisis alone,” but contend that “September’s climate strikes will kickstart a huge wave of action and renewed ambition all over the world.”

But will it? Five years ago, I reported on the People’s Climate March which gathered in New York City at the beginning of another United Nations Climate Summit in 2014. Around 400,000 people marched down Sixth Avenue in New York and thousands more attended some 2,600 rallies in 162 countries around the world. “When the people speak up and when the people march, the politicians will follow,” shouted Danny Kennedy, activist and founder of the solar company Sungevity in a pep talk before that March.

It is true that a year later, the countries of the world adopted the Paris agreement on climate change. Under that bottom-up agreement, signatories make voluntary commitments to limit their greenhouse gas emissions with the goal of keeping the increase of future average global temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. Right now, the global average temperature is about 1 degree Celsius higher than the late 19th-century average.

Since the People’s March, the annual global emissions of the chief non-condensing greenhouse gas carbon dioxide rose from 35.6 gigatons to 37.1 gigatons. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose from 397 parts per million to 409 parts per million (this a 46 percent increase over the pre-industrial level of about 280 parts per million). The last five years were the hottest since relatively good records began in the late 19th century.

At the U.N. summit in 2014, Chinese Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli declared, “Developed countries need to intensify emission reduction and fulfill their commitment of annual financial support of 100 billion U.S. dollars and technology transfer to developing countries by 2020.” At the summit next week, China will again demand that rich countries honor their commitments to hand over $100 billion annually to help developing countries (including China!) cope with climate change.

Overall, earlier mass protests have not been self-evidently successful at getting politicians to follow and moving forward the political and economic agenda of climate activists. On the other hand, protests like this Friday’s Climate Strike do capture the attention of the wider public. For example, a recent CBS News poll reports that 70 percent of Americans believe human activity contributes “a lot” or “some” to climate change and that 56 percent believe humans should act on climate change “right now.” A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll reported that 57 percent of American teenagers are afraid of climate change and 52 percent were angered by it.

With respect to publicizing climate movement’s concerns, such protests do seem to be succeeding.

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A new TV ad sponsored by the group Sandy Hook Promise depicts school shootings as a quotidian reality for children and teenagers in the United States, an ever-present threat that must be addressed through careful preparation and constant vigilance. The spot is emotionally compelling but highly misleading given the rarity of such incidents, inflating a tiny risk in a way that fosters unjustified anxiety, which tends to result in misguided policies and wasted resources.

The ad begins with a student at his locker, bragging about the backpack his mother bought him for the new school year. It continues with other students showing off their new purchases, which they use to deal with a mass shooter who is attacking their school: Sneakers come in handy as a student runs from the sound of gunfire, a jacket is used to tie closed a pair of doors to keep the shooter at bay, a skateboard is used to break a window so students can escape, a pair of scissors becomes a defensive weapon, a knee sock becomes a tourniquet for a wounded girl, and a crying girl hiding in a bathroom uses her new cellphone to text what may be her last words to her mother. “It’s back to school time,” says the closing caption, “and you know what that means. School shootings are preventable when you know the signs.”

School shootings, like airplane crashes and terrorist attacks, are dramatic and horrifying events that get a lot of attention precisely because they are unusual. FactCheck.org counted 64 deaths from school shootings between the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012 and the end of 2018. That number includes “students who died after being shot on school grounds, during school hours or after being shot on college campuses—or at student housing—where they were enrolled for classes.” The total amounts to about 11 deaths per year, including college students as well as minors.

School shooting fatalities represent an infinitesimal share of all firearm-related deaths among minors (3,143 in 2017), which mostly involve homicides committed away from school and suicides. Car crashes killed more than 4,000 minors in 2017, while 1,430 died from suffocation, nearly 1,000 drowned, a similar number succumbed to drug poisoning, and 340 died from fire or burns. In other words, children and teenagers are about 370 times as likely to die in traffic accidents and about 90 times as likely to die from drowning as they are to be killed in a school shooting. Lightning strikes kill more than twice as many people each year.

Fatalities aside, school shootings are extremely rare events. From April 1999 through May 2019, according to a Guns & America tally, there were 68 K–12 school shootings in the United States, including every instance where “a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week.” Even using that broad definition, there were about three school shootings a year. In 2018, the year with the most gun-related incidents at K–12 schools during this period, there were nine.

When you consider that there are about 133,000 K–12 schools in the United States, the risk that one of them will be threatened by a gunman in any given year is somewhere between 0.002 percent (using the 20-year average) and 0.007 percent (based on the 2018 total). The risk over the course of 13 years, from kindergarten through 12th grade, is between 0.03 percent and 0.09 percent. Yet Sandy Hook Promise is telling us that the risk of a school shooting is something that every child and parent needs to worry about, a danger that requires new “programs and practices that protect children from gun violence.”

The organization presents its agenda as utterly unexceptionable. “By uniting people of all beliefs and backgrounds who value the protection of children to take meaningful actions in their homes and communities,” it says, “we will prevent gun violence and stop the tragic loss of life.” That certainly sounds noncontroversial, as does Sandy Hook Promise’s claim that “school shootings are preventable when you know the signs.”

But is that true? In retrospect, many school shooters showed “red flags,” and in some cases (such as the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida) better attention to those signs might well have prevented their crimes. At the same time, almost none of the people who display what others interpret as red flags are actually bent on mass murder, so false positives will swamp true positives. That reality creates a risk not only of wasting law enforcement resources but of maligning and humiliating a lot of innocent people.

Or worse. Sandy Hook Promise seems to favor what it describes as “Extreme Risk Laws,” colloquially known as red flag laws, which strip people of their Second Amendment rights without due process. Based on the vanishingly small risk of school shootings, the organization is advocating a policy that takes away people’s constitutional rights when they are deemed a threat to themselves or others. The standards for issuing gun confiscation orders can be as weak as showing, by “a preponderance of the evidence,” that the respondent poses a “risk of danger,” whatever that means. And whatever the standard, judges have strong incentives to err on the side of issuing orders, lest they be blamed when something terrible happens.

Judging from the experience in Connecticut and Indiana, the two states with the oldest red flag laws, most gun confiscation orders have nothing to do with threats of violence, let alone plans for a school shooting. Instead they are aimed at people who are deemed to be suicidal. Even when the justification is that the respondent poses a threat to others, the evidence can be shockingly thin. In practice, the hunt for red flags can mean that someone loses his Second Amendment rights for a year or more because of a misunderstood (or misrepresented) conversation or because he said something offensive or controversial on social media.

Inflating the risk of school shootings also can lead to irrational school policies that invade privacy and undermine civil liberties. Last year, the Plano Independent School District, which runs the middle school my youngest daughter attends in Dallas, announced a new policy authorizing “random, suspicion-less metal detector searches” of students in grades 6 through 12. The district planned to use “both walk-through and hand-held metal detectors” on “random groups of students,” who would be required to “remove all metallic items from their pockets and person.” In addition, “backpacks, bags and personal items capable of concealing a weapon will be opened and inspected for the presence of weapons.” Any student “who refuses to comply with the search process will be removed from campus and subject to disciplinary consequences.”

According to my daughter, none of this has actually transpired at her school, so the policy may be mainly for show. Even if it were implemented, it would be pure security theater.

It strains credulity to imagine that a program like this would deter someone determined to commit mass murder. As the Texas Association of School Boards notes regarding metal detectors at entrances, “there is no guarantee…that a metal detector will stop a determined individual with a weapon.” It cites a 2005 attack in Red Lake, Minnesota, where “a student shot and killed seven people at his high school, including an unarmed security guard who was operating a metal detector at the main entrance.” Periodically scanning “random groups” of students would be even less of an obstacle to a mass shooter.

But such security practices do accomplish something. They condition teenagers to surrender their privacy in response to arbitrary edicts from people in authority, based on zero evidence that they pose any kind of threat. Training young people to accept such invasions leaves them ill-prepared for situations in which police overstep their authority. People who are accustomed to being searched for no reason at all are not likely to assert their constitutional rights when a cop asks if he can peruse their cars, homes, or personal belongings.

When Sandy Hook Promise advocates “programs and practices that protect children from gun violence,” skeptical readers should fill in the blanks with policies like these, which cast a wide net that catches far more innocent people than would-be killers. Like the similarly minuscule risk of dying in a terrorist attack, the danger of school shootings has been grossly exaggerated to the point that any policy said to address it, no matter how dubious, wasteful, invasive, or unfair, has a decent chance of being adopted.

“We’re trying to unite people in the common good of saving kids’ lives, as opposed to saying we should ban guns,” the chief creative officer at the advertising agency that created the Sandy Hook Promise spot told The New York Times. “It’s not about picking a side and defending it.”

That is obviously not true. Sandy Hook Promise and its allies have picked a side. It’s the one that favors overreacting to an objectively tiny but emotionally resonant danger. It’s a side so confident in its own virtue and good sense that it cannot imagine how any decent, reasonable person could disagree.

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A Michigan man was jailed last month on a $500,000 bond after writing critical posts on Facebook about the judge who denied him custody of his son. Jonathan Vanderhagen, 35, is now standing trial for malicious use of telecommunication services.

The saga began two years ago when Vanderhagen petitioned Macomb County Circuit Court Judge Rachel Rancilio for sole custody of his 2-year-old son, Killian. Vanderhagen argued that Killian’s biological mother was unfit to be Killian’s sole guardian. Judge Rancilio disagreed and the child’s mother was able to retain custody. 

Shortly after the custody dispute, Killian passed away in his mother’s care from what authorities concluded was a preexisting medical condition.

Despite that conclusion, Vanderhagen believed that Killian would still be alive had he been granted custody. Since his son’s death in 2017, Vanderhagen has used his Facebook page to criticize Rancilio’s custody ruling. Those posts, none of which were deemed threatening by the police department that investigated them, landed Vanderhagen in jail. 

According to a complaint and an emergency bond hearing provided to Reason by Vanderhagen’s lawyer, Nicholas Somberg, Vanderhagen was charged with one misdemeanor count of malicious use of telecommunication services due to his criticism of Rancilio. The definition of “malicious use” includes using a telecommunication service with the intention of terrorizing, intimidating, threatening, or harassing Rancilio.

The case report filled out by Sgt. Jason Conklin of the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office notes that Rancilio was made aware of Vanderhagen’s posts, several of which included screenshots of her own Facebook page and pins on Pinterest. The screenshots are accompanied by captions promising to expose the corruption of the court system and calling Rancilio and Mary Duross, a 14-year veteran Friend of the Court who was involved in the custody case, “shady.” 

“At no point does [Vanderhagen] threaten harm or violence towards Rancilio or Duross,” Conklin wrote in the case report.

Conklin took various screenshots of Vanderhagen’s Facebook posts, including the following. 

The Facebook post in question shows Vanderhagen holding a shovel with the photoshopped initials R.R. and M.D., believed to be Rancillio and Duross, respectively. The caption says, “Dada back to digging [and] you best believe [I’m] gonna dig up all the skeletons in this court’s closet.”

The post was published to Facebook on July 8. Somberg explains to Reason that the date of this particular post should have jeopardized the case brought against Vanderhagen.

Vanderhagen received a letter from Sgt. Morfino, dated July 10, informing him that there was a warrant for his arrest for malicious use of telecommunications. The letter says the actions occurred “on or about” July 7. Vanderhagen was arraigned before the Macomb County District Court on July 11.

Vanderhagen was released on a $10,000 bond under the condition that he would not engage in direct or third-party contact with Rancilio. Vanderhagen was also prohibited from sending “inadvertent messages by way of Facebook” to Rancilio.

Following the arraignment, Vanderhagen continued to use Facebook to post about his son, his son’s mother, and his case, topics Somberg argues are not in violation of the bond conditions set on July 11. Regardless, Vanderhagen was summoned to appear before District Judge Sebastian Lucido at the end of July for an emergency bond hearing, allegedly for “posting messages” about Rancilio.

A list of exhibits presented to the court highlights Facebook posts calling his son a hero, criticisms of his son’s mother, and criticisms of “the system,” none of which directly referenced Rancilio.

The only reference to Rancilio is found in Exhibit 1, which features screenshots of Vanderhagen’s July 8 Facebook post. Considering Vanderhagen did not receive his bond conditions until three days after that Facebook post was published online, however, its inclusion seems like an inappropriate attempt to paint Vanderhagen as more of a threat than he actually is.

In a transcript of the exchange between Somberg and Judge Lucido at the emergency bond hearing, Somberg argued that Vanderhagen has a First Amendment right to air his court-related grievances online:

MR. SOMBERG: Every one of these exhibits are innocuous, are irrelevant, are not threatening, are not harassing or not intimidating in any way whatsoever. And I would make the argument that he can F say the Judge, F the President of the United States. I mean you have the right to say that stuff.

Lucido’s responded that there are “limits” to the First Amendment right to free speech:

THE COURT: There cannot be anything of a threatening nature. You can’t yell. They used the example, the famous case, you can’t yell fire in a public place or movie theater, something like that. We’re talking about threatening a sitting Circuit Court Judge is the original allegation against Mr. Vanderhagen. When there’s a no contact, it’s no contact directly, indirectly or social media. These are [although] he likes to hint around the fringes of it, in my opinion they are of a threatening nature after the no contact was put in place.

Somberg then asked Lucido to explain why the other posts were considered threatening towards Rancilio. Lucido told Somberg that the Facebook posts “speak for themselves:”

THE COURT: You can sit there and read every one of them if you want but [they’re] already part of the record.

MR. SOMBERG: I understand that, your Honor, but you just said that you found the exhibits to show that they are threatening in nature. I’m just asking what—

THE COURT: Correct—

MR. SOMBERG: —is threatening about them.

THE COURT: —because [they’re] alluding to Judge Rancilio and I’m not going to sit here and explain it any further. But here’s what I am going to read and what is also put in LEIN. Do not harass, intimidate, beat, molest, wound, stalk, threaten or engage in any other conduct that would place any of the following persons or a child of any of the following person’s in reasonable fear of bodily injury, spouse, former spouse, individual with whom the defendant has a child in common, resident or former resident of the household. Do not assault, harass, intimidate, beat, wound or threaten the following persons, Rachel Rancilio. And in my opinion, he’s violated that.

“People have a constitutional right to express opinions about government officials, including judges,” says Loyola Law School Professor Aaron Caplan. “Defendants who appear before a judge have this right, just like anybody else. It might not be wise to criticize the judge hearing your case, but it is a right that defendants have if they want to exercise it.”

Caplan notes that free speech “does not include the right to make what the law calls ‘true threats’ to inflict bodily harm on any other person, including judges.”

Yet Conklin, the investigating sergeant in Vanderhagen’s case, concluded that “[a]t no point does [Vanderhagen] threaten harm or violence towards Rancilio or Duross.”

Not only does it appear that Vanderhagen’s First Amendment rights have been violated, Judge Lucido also increased Vanderhagen’s bond to $500,000, raising questions about the use of excessive bail amounts as a means of further punishing and suppressing Vanderhagen’s speech. 

In an emergency appeal, Somberg argued that that legal precedent states that “bail is excessive if it is in an amount greater than reasonably necessary to adequately assure that the accused will appear when his…presence is required.” The nature of the offense, Somberg continued, also raises questions about the $500,000 bond. Vanderhagen was charged with a misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail and a maximum fine of $1,000.

Somberg can see no logical explanation for the court’s decision to increase Vanderhagen’s bond 50 times the initial amount. Vanderhagen has no criminal record. Nor is he a registered firearm owner. These factors, Somberg argues, would justify a lower bond, not a higher bond.

In a statement to Reason, Somberg likens the high bond to intimidation. “He has never threatened anybody, has no criminal history, and is no flight risk. A $500,000 cash bond is what you would expect for a murderer or rapist. I can’t think of any other reason to set such an astronomically high bond other than to intimidate and punish him for his speech. We are fighting this case not just for my client but to defend the constitutional rights of all of us,” Somberg says.

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My copy of Edward Snowden’s new autobiography, Permanent Record, arrived in the mail yesterday just hours after the Department of Justice announced that they want to seize the money I (and many others) paid for it and transfer that money to the federal government.

The Justice Department has filed a civil suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia accusing Snowden of breaching his non-disclosure agreement as a former CIA employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor by not submitting his book for pre-publication review so that government officials can make sure it didn’t reveal any classified information.

Snowden is living in exile somewhere near Moscow, charged by this same Justice Department with espionage in 2013 for leaking troves of classified documents showing how the NSA had been secretly collecting massive amounts of private phone and internet communications data from millions of Americans, using a section of the post-9/11 Patriot Act as justification.

Rather remarkably, the Justice Department, despite its concerns that the CIA and NSA did not pre-review his book, is not seeking to stop the book’s distribution. Instead, they want to force MacMillan Publishers, MacMillan Publishing Group, and Holtzbrinck Publishers to hand over to the government any money they earn from the book’s sales and not pass along any of the proceeds to Snowden.

They’re invoking a Supreme Court precedent from 1980, Snepp v. United States, that allows the government to seize royalties from former CIA and NSA employees if they publish books about agency activities without submitting their manuscripts for pre-publication review.

Mind you, there’s nothing in this Justice Department lawsuit and its press release that explains what would have happened had Snowden, a fugitive, actually submitted his manuscript for review or how that would even work.

It doesn’t stop there. Snowden has been giving speeches and remote interviews since 2014 about his work and his whistleblowing, and the Justice Department is going after him about that as well. The lawsuit notes that he makes money from his speeches, which he also does not submit to the CIA or FBI for pre-review (as his agreements with the agencies require).

The lawsuit seems rather comical given that Snowden is famous for leaking classified information, and Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, has said in a statement that the book contains no classified information that hasn’t already been published by the media.

But the lawsuit isn’t supposed to make logical sense. The purpose of the lawsuit is to punish Snowden, even though they cannot get him back to the United States to put on trial. It’s a bit similar to civil asset forfeiture: They aren’t able to convict Snowden, so they’re just going to try to take his stuff. Look at the way Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt describes the actions of a man who became famous for informing the public that its own government was secretly collecting their private data:

“This lawsuit demonstrates that the Department of Justice does not tolerate these breaches of the public’s trust. We will not permit individuals to enrich themselves, at the expense of the United States, without complying with their pre-publication review obligations.”

(Emphasis mine.)

Polls show that more Americans see Snowden as a whistleblower, not as a traitor. The public’s trust was breached by the NSA’s secret surveillance, not Snowden, who has maintained that the reason he won’t return to the United States for a trial is because he won’t be allowed to make the case to a jury that his actions were justified whistleblowing for the purpose of benefiting the American public—not an attempt to aid foreign opponents of the United States, as detractors claim.

Snowden, is of course, basking in the extra attention he’s getting from the lawsuit, as well he should:

Yesterday, the government sued the publisher of #PermanentRecord for—not kidding—printing it without giving the CIA and NSA a change to erase details of their classified crimes from the manuscript. Today, it is the best-selling book in the world: https://t.co/oMJLOvUjG7

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 18, 2019

In the meantime, the authority for the type of domestic surveillance Snowden exposed expires this year unless Congress acts. Even though the NSA has actually abandoned this type of mass metadata collection and recommended that Congress let authorization lapse, the White House is not only asking for these authorities to be renewed, but to be made permanent.

We would not know nearly as much about the extent of unwarranted federal government snooping and the mass collection of Americans’ data were it not for Snowden’s whistleblowing. It’s absurd and insulting—but not surprising—that the Department of Justice continues to paint him as an enemy of the American people and use that as justification to try to seize any money he makes, even from American citizens like myself who are voluntarily purchasing his book.

Below, defy the Justice Department to watch this interview of Snowden by Reason‘s Nick Gillespie in 2016:

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In order to wage war against home-sharing platforms, a former hotel executive and freshman congressman is trying to rewrite one of the fundamental laws which guarantees a free and open internet.

Rep. Ed Case (D–Hawaii) has introduced the “Protecting Local Authority and Neighborhoods Act” which would use federal power to stop websites like Airbnb and HomeAway from including listings that are illegal under local ordinances or state laws—in places like Hawaii, for example, which has some of the strictest laws against home-sharing in the country.

In a statement announcing the bill, Case said his proposal “would end abusive litigation by Internet-based short-term rental platforms like AirBnb, HomeAway, VRBO, Flipkey, and others attempting to avoid accountability for profiting from illegal rentals.”

That supposedly “abusive litigation” those websites are engaging in? It’s nothing more than pointing to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996—otherwise known as the 26 words that created the modern internet. Under the legal framework created by Section 230, online platforms are protected from legal liability for the content hosted on their servers, websites, or apps.

If Airbnb and other home-sharing platforms are pointing to Section 230 to avoid liability for supposedly “illegal” listings, that’s hardly different from a person pointing to the First Amendment as a defense against being prosecuted for saying “hey, if you want to stay in my apartment for a few days, you can.“ The government has no business regulating how people use their private property in the first place, and it certainly has no business prosecuting anyone for merely advertising that a rental is available.

But that’s what Case wants to do, and he’s willing to tear up Section 230 in order to do it. His bill proposes specifically exempting any online platform offering rental property from Section 230’s protections. To borrow the same analogy, it’s the equivalent of saying Congress should rewrite the First Amendment so that it applies to everyone except my neighbor Bob, because I really don’t like how Bob stands in the middle of the street and yells about how people can rent his spare bedroom.

That would be insane, of course. Furthermore, excluding one group of online platforms from Section 230 would start an avalanche of similarly grievance-based legislation aimed at other corners of the internet. There are already a bunch of proposals floating around Congress—all of them bad ideas—to rewrite or abolish Section 230 so the government can have greater control over online content. Each of them come with promises of protecting children from online predators or saving Americans from the scourge of autoplay videos, but all carry a thinly-veiled threat of making all online content subject to government censorship.

Case says his legislation is meant to help state and local governments that are “updating their land-use laws to more tightly regulate short-term rental activity including liability for the platforms,” but it is pretty obvious that he’s really just doing the hotel industry’s bidding.

To say that Case has close ties to the hotel industry is an understatement. Before getting elected to Congress last year, he was on the American Hotel and Lodging Association’s (AHLA) board of directors. Prior to that, he was a senior vice president for a Hawaiian hotel chain, Outrigger Enterprises Group. Two of Case’s four largest donors, according to federal campaign finance data, are the AHLA and Marriott International.

“These Big Tech rental platforms are invoking a loophole in a federal law to snub their noses at local government leaders across the country, while continuing to profit from illegal business transactions,” says Chip Rogers, president and CEO of the AHLA, in the congressman’s statement announcing the bill. Elsewhere in the same statement, Rogers refers to Section 230 as an “antiquated law.”

The AHLA has been on the front lines of the hotel industry’s fight to stop Airbnb from competing with the Hiltons and Marriotts of the world. They were behind a series of misleading ads blaming Airbnb for harming neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. (even though the group had hired actors to play the roles of concerned residents). More seriously, the AHLA has helped write many of the local ordinances Case says he’s trying to enforce with his bill. “You got to thank all of our friends at AHLA for working as hard as they have been to push legislation across the country really in all these key cities,” Mike Barnello, chief executive of LaSalle Hotel Properties, said during a conference call with shareholders in 2016, before crediting those efforts with keeping prices high at hotel properties in New York City.

Indeed, the bottom line for hotel chains is the bottom line. Restricting home-sharing means artificially higher prices for hotel rooms—particularly when demand surges, studies show. Property rights and “antiquated laws” like the fundamental building block of a free and open internet? Those are lesser concerns.

“This bill creates a moral hazard by letting big hotel chains harass short term rental competitors, just so the big hotels can further increase their room rates,” says Steve DelBianco, president of NetChoice, a trade association of e-commerce businesses. “Weakening Section 230 will damage Americans’ ability to communicate online. The bill empowers Marriott to stop us from lawfully earning rental income on our own homes.”

When you dig a little, most attempts to rewrite Section 230 are rooted in attempts by one industry to kneecap another. But it’s rare to see such a blatant example of self-serving legislation.

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