If you hate Trump’s Tweets
Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.

If you hate fact-checks,
Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.

If you love fact-checks and wish Facebook had to do more of them,
Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.

If you're upset that Twitter and Facebook keep removing content that favors your political viewpoints,
Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.

If you're upset that your favorite social media site won't take down content that offends you,
Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.

If you're mad at search engines for indexing websites you don't agree with,
Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.

If you're mad at a website for removing your posts - even when it seems unreasonable
Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.

If you don't like the way a website aggregates content on your feed or in your search results,
Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.

If you wish websites had to carry and remove only specific pre-approved types of content
Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.

If you wish social media services had to be politically neutral,
Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.

If someone wrote a negative online review about you or your business,
Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.

And at the end of the day, If you hate editorial discretion and free speech,
You probably just hate the First Amendment... not Section 230.


What many erroneously (and ironically) declare as “censorship” is really no different from the editorial discretion enjoyed by newspapers, broadcasters, and your local bookstore. When it comes to the online world, we simply call it content moderation. The decision to fact-check, remove, reinstate, or simply leave content up, is wholly within the First Amendment’s purview. On the flip side, as private, non-government actors, websites do not owe their users the same First Amendment protection for their content.

Or, as TechFreedom’s brilliant Ashkhen Kazaryan wisely puts it,
the First Amendment protects Twitter from Trump, but not Trump from Twitter.

What then is Section 230’s use if the First Amendment already stands in the way? Put simply, Section 230 says websites are not liable for third-party content.

In practice, Section 230 merely serves as a free speech fast-lane. Under Section 230, websites can reach the same inevitable conclusions they would reach under the First Amendment, only faster and cheaper.

Importantly, Section 230 grants websites and users peace of mind knowing that plaintiffs are less likely to sue them for exercising their editorial discretion—and even if they do—websites and users are almost always guaranteed a fast, cheap, and painless win.

That peace of mind is especially crucial for market entrants posed to unseat the big tech incumbents.
With that, it seems that Americans haven’t fallen out of love with Section 230, rather, alarmingly, they’ve fallen out of love with the First Amendment.

Within a few years, I had become convinced of three things:

To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero greenhouse gas emissions.
We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter.
And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.
The case for zero was, and is, rock solid. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions—but not eliminate them—won’t do it. The only sensible goal is zero.

This book suggests a way forward, a series of steps we can take to give ourselves the best chance to avoid a climate disaster. It breaks down into five parts:

Why zero? In chapter 1, I’ll explain more about why we need to get to zero, including what we know (and what we don’t) about how rising temperatures will affect people around the world.

The bad news: Getting to zero will be really hard. Because every plan to achieve anything starts with a realistic assessment of the barriers that stand in your way, in chapter 2 we’ll take a moment to consider the challenges we’re up against.

How to have an informed conversation about climate change. In chapter 3, I’ll cut through some of the confusing statistics you might have heard and share the handful of questions I keep in mind in every conversation I have about climate change. They have kept me from going wrong more times than I can count, and I hope they will do the same for you.

The good news: We can do it. In chapters 4 through 9, I’ll break down the areas where today’s technology can help and where we need breakthroughs. This will be the longest part of the book, because there’s so much to cover. We have some solutions we need to deploy in a big way now, and we also need a lot of innovations to be developed and spread around the world in the next few decades.

Steps we can take now. I wrote this book because I see not just the problem of climate change; I also see an opportunity to solve it. That’s not pie-in-the-sky optimism. We already have two of the three things you need to accomplish any major undertaking. First, we have ambition, thanks to the passion of a growing global move­ment led by young people who are deeply concerned about climate change. Second, we have big goals for solving the problem as more national and local leaders around the world commit to doing their part.

Now we need the third component: a concrete plan to achieve our goals.

Just as our ambitions have been driven by an appreciation for climate science, any practical plan for reducing emissions has to be driven by other disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, economics, finance, and more. So in the final chap­ters of this book, I’ll propose a plan based on guidance I’ve gotten from experts in all these disciplines. In chapters 10 and 11, I’ll focus on policies that governments can adopt; in chapter 12, I’ll suggest steps that each of us can take to help the world get to zero. Whether you’re a government leader, an entrepreneur, or a voter with a busy life and too little free time (or all of the above), there are things you can do to help avoid a climate disaster.

That’s it. Let’s get started.