Deescalating conflict around protests was possible, but many colleges turned to law enforcement instead.

For weeks, police have been arriving on college campuses from New York to California at the behest of university officials, sweeping pro-Palestinian protests and arresting more than 2,100 people. They’ve come in riot gear, zip-tied students and hauled them off, and in some high-profile instances, acted violently.

The aggressive crackdown started when Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, summoned New York Police Department officers to campus in mid-April to bring an end to the student encampment there, one day after she promised Congress she would quash unauthorized protests and discipline students for antisemitism.

That police intervention temporarily dismantled the encampment, and resulted in the arrest of more than 100 protesters on trespassing charges.

But it was also a strategic failure on the part of the university administration. If the university was trying to avoid disruption, it has ended up inviting it instead.

In the days since, as support for the protesters has swelled both at Columbia and at hundreds of colleges across the country, students have set up encampments, organized rallies, and in a few cases escalated their protests by occupying university buildings. Similar protests even cropped up in other countries.

In response, other universities have taken Columbia’s lead and cracked down on these protests, which seek to end colleges’ investments in firms supporting Israel’s occupation and its ongoing assault on Gaza. Nearly 50 universities have called the authorities to intervene, and students and faculty have been beaten, tear gassed, and shot at with rubber bullets by police.

This week, when Columbia escalated its police response, the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, reported that “officers threw a protester down the stairs ... and slammed protesters with barricades.” A police officer also fired a gun in a campus building, and others threatened to arrest student journalists.

This can only be described as a major overreaction to student protests. But it also didn’t happen in a vacuum. The police response falls squarely in a long pattern of colleges suppressing pro-Palestinian activism and anti-Israel speech — one that dates back many decades. Currently, universities aren’t applying their rules equally, singling out only some student advocacy as unacceptable campus speech and, in some cases, even changing rules to specifically target these protests. (The Department of Education is now reportedly investigating Columbia for anti-Palestinian discrimination.)

While schools including Columbia were quick to call in law enforcement, however, a few other schools have taken an alternative approach — with vastly different outcomes. Administrators at Brown, Northwestern, and several others negotiated with students, allowed them to continue protesting, or even reached deals to end the encampments by meeting some of the protesters’ demands. As a result, they’ve avoided the kind of disruption and chaos unfolding at universities that called the police.

These divergent outcomes among schools that relied on police and those that didn’t offer an important lesson on how universities should manage campus activism, while ensuring students’ safety and protecting speech.

A messy and misguided response to protests

It only took a day and a half after the first Columbia encampment was set up for Shafik to call the police on April 18. In her letter to the NYPD, she wrote that she had “determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.” Shafik did not explain what threat the encampments actually posed. (Samantha Slater, a spokeswoman for the university, told Vox that Columbia would not offer comment beyond Shafik’s letter.)

The protest itself was not especially disruptive — even the police said protesters were peaceful. They didn’t get in the way of students going about their daily activities, including attending classes.

In many ways, the demonstration at Columbia was a standard student protest: Demonstrators were raising awareness about a problem and asking their university to do something about it. Encampments have been used as a protest tactic on college campuses for decades, including in recent years, like when students ran divestment campaigns against fossil fuels.

In the 1980s, when Columbia students protested against South African apartheid, with virtually the same divestment demands as the current protesters have, they blockaded a campus building for three weeks. In that case, the school came to an agreement with the student protesters rather than turning to the police to break up the demonstration.

While other campus protests historically have led to arrests, few have attracted such a massive national police response so swiftly. What’s taking place now looks similar to how schools responded to anti-war protests in the 1960s and ’70s, when schools, including Columbia, violently cracked down on students. And in 1970, the National Guard infamously shot at protesters at Kent State in Ohio and killed four people. Yet, as my colleague Nicole Narea wrote, the protests then were more aggressive than the encampments on campuses today.

The line between legal and illegal protest is often clear. Students have a right to protest in certain campus areas, but occupying a building constitutes trespassing. Enforcement of these rules, however, is seldom applied equally.

In many cases, universities have alleged that the protests were disruptive and pointed to the fact that some Jewish students felt that the encampments created an unsafe environment for them on campus. While harassment and intimidation can be reasons to involve law enforcement, the accusations against these protesters mostly focused on their chants and campaign slogans — and in many cases wrongly conflate anti-Israel rhetoric with antisemitism. (It’s worth noting that the arrested student protesters have largely been charged with trespassing, not harassment or violent acts.)

One of the other problems with how many universities and officials have responded to pro-Palestinian demonstrations is that they have changed their protest rules since October 7, in some instances specifically targeting Palestinian solidarity groups.

At Columbia, for example, the university issued onerous protest guidelines, including limiting the areas students are allowed to protest and requiring that demonstrations be registered weeks in advance. Northwestern University abruptly imposed a ban on erecting tents and other structures on campus, undermining ongoing protests. Indiana University preemptively changed its rules one day before its students set up an encampment by disallowing tents and changing a decades-old rule. And in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order requiring that public universities change their free speech policies and singled out pro-Palestinian groups that he said ought to be disciplined.

Such moves have only added fuel to the protests. They also put students and faculty in danger, as police have conducted violent arrests. (Why were there snipers on roofs at Indiana University, anyway?)

It can also ultimately be ineffective; after state troopers arrested students at the University of Texas, for example, the Travis County Attorney’s Office dismissed the criminal trespassing charges, saying they lacked probable cause.

Is there a better response to campus protests?

Not all universities have turned to the police in response to pro-Palestinian protests. Those that chose a different path have seen much less tension than those that did.

Evergreen State College, for example, agreed to its student demands, promising to divest from businesses profiting off human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. Students agreed to end their encampment in response.

Schools that didn’t necessarily acquiesce to protesters’ demands took other, non-escalatory steps to quell demonstrations. Brown University, which had last year called police to disband protesters, took an alternative approach this time around: The university negotiated with protesters, and organizers agreed to clear the encampment earlier this week after the school’s governing body announced that it will hold a vote on divesting from companies with ties to Israel later this year. Northwestern University similarly reached a deal with its students by reestablishing an advisory committee on its investments.

At Michigan State University, President Kevin Guskiewicz visited the student encampment himself and talked to the protesters about their concerns. He allowed students to continue the protest, so long as they applied for a permit, which the students did and the university granted. As a result, the school has avoided the kind of disruptions seen at Columbia and other universities.

There’s a simple way for universities to handle these protests: Treat them like other protests.

As the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in an open letter to college and university presidents, schools can announce content-neutral rules and enforce them — that is, set up guidelines that don’t just target certain protests, such as the ongoing pro-Palestinian ones. “The rules must not only be content neutral on their face; they must also be applied in a content-neutral manner. If a university has routinely tolerated violations of its rules, and suddenly enforces them harshly in a specific context, singling out particular views for punishment, the fact that the policy is formally neutral on its face does not make viewpoint-based enforcement permissible,” the ACLU wrote.

At Columbia, where the aggressive police response started a national pattern, it’s hard to argue that enforcement was neutral from the start of the encampment. “Just imagine these students were protesting, say, in solidarity with women’s protests in Iran,” wrote Zeynep Tufekci, a sociology professor at Princeton and author of the book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, in a post on X. “I don’t see how [the] NYPD would have been called in to arrest them 36 hours into their then small protest.”

Instead, Columbia called law enforcement, and now campuses across the country are environments that are unsafe for students and faculty alike. Pro-Israel counterprotesters, for example, attacked student encampments earlier this week at the University of California Los Angeles with pepper spray, wooden planks, and fireworks. (Notably, while schools acted swiftly to uproot the encampments, UCLA was an example of how slow they have been in actually protecting the protesters from violence.)

Ultimately, the moment Shafik called in the NYPD set the stage for a far more disruptive end of the semester for schools nationwide than what the original protests would have achieved on their own.

“From the very beginning, calling in the police quickly has been an escalatory dynamic,” Tufekci wrote on X. “It almost always is.”

Flying has gotten hellish. Consumers might finally get compensated.

Under a new rule from the Biden administration, passengers could soon get relief for one of the most frequently cited travel grievances.

The rule, which was announced in late April, would require airlines to provide automatic refunds for flight delays, an issue that’s been a major source of consumer frustration in recent years. That’s a big change from existing policies, which give airlines significant leeway in doling out these refunds and require travelers to push for them themselves.

This proposal is just the latest consumer protection policy from the Biden administration and part of the White House’s broader efforts to burnish these credentials ahead of the 2024 election this fall. While the White House has had legislative success, including the passage of bills that lower prescription drug prices and make substantial investments in infrastructure, communicating those wins can be tough because many of these proposals will take years to implement and be felt.

The airline refund rule, which will go into effect in October, offers an immediate example of how the administration is trying to address a commonly expressed grievance. It also comes as negative sentiment has grown toward the airline industry in the wake of a shocking Boeing plane incident in January and subsequent scrutiny of industry-wide quality control issues. All told, delays and cancellations have cost airlines $8.3 billion and consumers $16.7 billion on an annual basis.

Here’s what you need to know about how the rule works and why it’s happening in the first place.

How the rule works

The new rule, to be implemented by the Department of Transportation (DOT), requires airlines to provide refunds for both flight cancellations and “significant changes.” For the first time, the agency spells out what these changes entail. They include:

• If a domestic flight is delayed more than three hours
• If an international flight is delayed more than six hours
• If the location of the departure or arrival airport changes
• If more connections are added to a flight
• If passengers are downgraded to a different class or service than the one they paid for

These criteria set a common standard for all airlines, making the basis for such refunds clear for both travelers and companies.

The new rule also makes these refunds automatic. That means that consumers don’t have to file a claim with the airline, streamlining the process.

The policy requires refunds to be provided within seven business days to consumers who use a credit card, and within 20 calendar days to those who use other forms of payment. Travelers will only be eligible if they turn down an alternative flight option or other compensation, like a travel voucher. That means if a passenger still took a flight after it was delayed for four hours, for example, they would not be eligible for the refund.

The new rule also guarantees refunds of other fees in case wifi doesn’t work or if checked baggage does not arrive within 12 hours of a domestic flight landing, or within 15 to 30 hours of an international flight landing.

Automating refunds is an important part of this policy because it puts the onus of figuring out penalties on the airlines and not the consumer. One issue that consumer advocate Christopher Elliott previously highlighted in the Washington Post, for example, was that customers in Europe would have to wait months for refunds they were seeking because airlines would take their time processing claims. The way the White House rule is written attempts to prevent companies from dragging their feet and to make them take on the logistical burdens of this process.

A bipartisan group of Congress members, however, are trying to undercut this provision of the rule. In a new bill that reauthorizes funding for the Federal Aviation Administration, lawmakers have included language that would require consumers to file a claim before they could receive a refund, Skift reports. “You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get your money back,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said in a statement in response to this measure. Warren and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have also filed an amendment to the FAA bill in an attempt to preserve the White House’s rule.

Biden is going in on consumer protection policies

The proposed rule is one of several consumer protection policies the White House has advanced in the last year.

It follows an FDA proposal that enabled hearing aids to be sold over the counter, likely reducing their cost, as well as a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) rule that reduces late fees for credit card payments. DOT also has another rulemaking in process that would eliminate additional fees for families trying to sit together on planes, the Federal Trade Commission is working on a rule to ban the use of hidden fees, and the CFPB is targeting bank overdraft fees as well.

Biden touted aspects of this push in his State of the Union address earlier this year in a bid to highlight his commitment to consumer protections.

The flight refund rule is intended to combat traveler discontent with the airline industry and the time and financial losses people face when they have to change their plans or reschedule travel. In a challenging election year, the choice to focus on such concerns allows the White House to point to key policies it’s delivered on and that people can feel directly in their daily lives.

It’s time to take back the Israel-Palestine debate from the radicals on both sides.

You may have heard of Shai Davidai, the Israeli professor at Columbia University who has launched a crusade against the school’s pro-Palestinian protestors.

He’s rocketed to fame by calling students terrorists, comparing himself to Jewish victims of Nazi Germany, and demanding the National Guard forcibly break up the student encampments. After the NYPD stormed Columbia’s campus on Tuesday night, arresting hundreds of students, he retweeted a message blaming the events on “a circus of narcissists, egged on by irresponsible faculty.” (Indeed.)

Davidai, like many of the loud pro-Israel voices in the national debate, is casting blanket aspersions on students who are protesting for good reasons. Well over 30,000 Palestinians are dead, many of whom are children; the devastation is so complete that a fully accurate death toll is now impossible. There is no good moral or strategic justification for Israel’s scorched-earth approach, which currently risks strengthening the terrorist group Hamas’s strategic position in the long term. Given that billions of American dollars are underwriting this atrocity, it’s easy to see why college campuses are in uproar.

But while the majority of students are genuinely motivated by justifiable outrage, a smaller faction have gone to a much darker place: going so far as endorsing Hamas’s murder of Israelis and calling for the violent destruction of Israel. All too often, they are tolerated by — or even members of — protest leadership.

Students for Justice in Palestine, the biggest national force behind the college protests, has described Hamas’s mass slaughter on October 7 as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” Khymani James, one of the leaders of the Columbia protests, publicly fantasized about murdering “Zionists.” University of Pennsylvania students chanted in support of Hamas’s military wing (“al-Qassam, make us proud, take another soldier down”). An organizer at UC-Berkeley distributed pamphlets explaining, in his words, how the Hamas attack “was an act of decolonization.”

The reciprocal extremism on college campuses, egged on by irresponsible university administrators who have heightened tensions by calling in the cops, is a window into a reality everyone knows: The American conversation about Israel-Palestine is broken.

Anyone who even touches the issue knows it’s toxic. The conversation is dominated by extremists who aggressively police the slightest misstep and punish internal dissent, a longstanding dynamic supercharged in recent years by social media. Recently, a prominent person in American politics privately told me that they see engagement on the topic as a no-win proposition. About half of all young American Jewish adults have stopped talking to someone they know over the conflict.

There are deep reasons why America’s Israel-Palestine discourse is so dysfunctional. They range from the pro-Israel movement’s embrace of Israeli extremists to the pro-Palestinian movement’s radical-chic culture to the uninspiring alternative on offer in official Washington. Put together, they create an environment where the loudest and most influential voices on each side are all too often the most aggressive and uncompromising ones.

In such an environment, the most reasonable people on each side — the ones that recognize that neither Israelis or Palestinians are going anywhere, and that peace can only be found through negotiated compromise — are sidelined. They are getting very little help from some alleged supporters of a two-state solution in Washington, where an insipid and out-of-touch approach does its own work to discredit the center.

Understanding these dynamics can help us grasp the dueling narratives around the campus protests. But more importantly, it can help us comprehend why the space for creating pro-peace coalitions seems to have shrunk — and what can be done to rebuild it.

Inside the pro-Israel movement’s radicalization

In the United States, the Israel-Palestine debate has gone through a long process of polarization and radicalization that has only gotten worse in recent years.

I know the dynamics on the pro-Israel side firsthand: When I was in college in the late 2000s, I was the president of my university’s pro-Israel campus group. I abandoned the post shortly after I got into a public argument with one of my own members after he endorsed West Bank settlement, an enterprise that I always thought was both morally wrong and politically suicidal.

As Israel’s government moved more and more to the right, increasingly captured by the anti-Palestinian settler movement, the pro-Israel movement moved with them — leaving no place for people like me. Today, I spend much of my professional life criticizing Israel from the anti-occupation left.

There are deep reasons why the pro-Israel movement is the way that it is. When I used to attend closed-door events for student activists held by AIPAC, the leading American pro-Israel lobby, they would tell us that they do not see second-guessing the Israeli government as part of the job description. Israel’s leaders determined what was in the country’s best interests; AIPAC and its activists worked merely to support that agenda on Capitol Hill.

Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

This “we don’t judge” policy, rooted in an uncompromising version of Zionism that grants little weight to Palestinian rights, has turned AIPAC and its allies into lobbyists for colonialism. In this, they have enthusiastically linked up with outright right-wing extremists like Pastor John Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel. The pro-Israel movement, once comfortable with a two-state solution when Israel’s leadership supported it, is now doing everything in its power to back a government bent on destroying it.

What was once called “liberal Zionism” — the view, held by a majority of American Jews, that Israel has a right to exist but no right to occupy Palestinian land — no longer has a place in the organized pro-Israel movement. AIPAC and other mainstream pro-Israel groups treat the smaller liberal Zionist organizations, like J Street and Americans for Peace Now, as mortal enemies.

The pro-Israel movement’s current job is mainstreaming Israeli extremism. And it has long been willing to threaten people’s careers and livelihoods — through tools like a public blacklist of pro-Palestinian scholars and students — in order to accomplish that end.

When “pro-Palestine” becomes “anti-peace”

The pro-Palestinian movement in the United States is far weaker than its pro-Israel twin. There is no Palestinian AIPAC capable of leading $100 million campaigns to unseat members of Congress. But as Americans’ sympathy with Palestinians continues to grow, the movement is poised to wield greater influence down the line — making its own radicalization process a subject of real concern.

In his book The Movement and the Middle East, historian Michael Fischbach argues that the 1960s-era radical left in the United States fractured over Israel-Palestine, and the events of that period determined “where progressive Americans stand on these issues today.”

During the Cold War, the most hardline factions took an uncompromising pro-Palestine stance, seeing armed Arab struggle against Israel as part of the global fight against Western imperialism. More moderate groups, by contrast, supported Israel in existential conflicts like the 1967 Six-Day War. With extreme left factions playing a disproportionate role in shaping pro-Palestine activism, a significant chunk of the movement took on a similarly radical cast.

In this, they were aided by the censorious efforts of the pro-Israel extremists, who worked to turn “Palestine” into a dirty word in mainstream American political discourse. This meant that, for many years, young people passionate about the Palestinian cause were drawn toward far-left factions who called for Israel’s destruction, lionized Palestinian violence, and saw the two-state solution as a sellout compromise.

Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

“It became a far-left issue because it was so stigmatized,” says Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “You had to be on the far left … in order to fit being a champion of the Palestinians into your professional career path.”

In the 2000s, Ibish helped found the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), a DC-based group that aimed to promote the Palestinian cause from a pro-peace standpoint. He recalls unremitting hostility from both the AIPAC-style pro-Israel groups and the existing far-left pro-Palestinian infrastructure. ATFP was chronically short of money, maxing out at three full-time policy staffers. It ultimately shuttered its doors in 2016.

“We failed,” Ibish says, “because no one supported us.”

Today, the Palestinian cause is far more mainstream than it once was — especially among young people and liberals. This is primarily the result of Israel’s rightward political drift: As Israel continues West Bank colonization and pulverizing Gaza, the injustice of the status quo becomes increasingly hard to deny.

Yet far-left maximalists still wield disproportionate influence in the pro-Palestine activist and intellectual communities. This is why prominent voices on the issue today — like the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, “dirtbag left” podcasters, the president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and academics like Judith Butler — have been able to praise or sanitize Hamas’s actions on October 7 without meaningful pushback on their own side.

Breaking the radicalization doom loop

The most radical voices on both sides are not representative of broader public opinion. Polling shows that Americans favor a two-state solution by a roughly 20-point margin. About 30 percent support Israeli annexation of the West Bank; only 5 percent believe that Hamas’s action on October 7 was acceptable. A sizable majority of American Jews are uncomfortable with actions of the Israeli state; only a small minority of American Muslims endorse terrorism against Israelis.

The radicalism you see in the news or on social media reflects neither the mass public nor the views of Americans from the most affected groups. Instead, it reflects the views of the extremely engaged. Their every utterance or action is magnified by their extreme allies and enemies alike, making it seem as if the worst and most marginal voices stand in for everyone else.

Extreme activists polarizing public debates is not an uncommon phenomenon: Look, for example, at the way anti-abortion activists or climate change radicals push well beyond what the average person in their coalition supports. Once people get locked into mutually hostile camps, the rank-and-file becomes more tolerant of any kind of extremism directed at their opponents — and less tolerant of any internal voices calling for compromise and mutual dialogue. The more radical one side appears, the more the other radicalizes in response.

What’s happening on Israel-Palestine is an especially bitter version of this standard political polarization doom loop.

So what can be done? The obvious answer is to make space for pro-peace voices. And that starts, counterintuitively, by creating room for more challenges to what appears like a moderate Washington consensus — but in reality is a debate heavily tilted toward Israel.

Both major American political parties have long been staunchly pro-Israel. The Republican version of this is rabid, increasingly aligned with Netanyahu and his far-right government. The Democratic version is pallid, mouthing empty support for two states and bromides about shared liberal values even as Israel starves Palestinian children. The handful of dissenters, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) or Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), have been relentlessly attacked as anti-Israel or even antisemitic (though there’s more room for them today than there has been in the past).

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

When the establishment seems out of touch with reality, extremism tends to flourish. Republicans may be fine with that, but Democrats clearly are not. If they wish to defang campus radicals on their left flank, they need to create more space in the system for taking legitimate concerns with Israel’s behavior seriously. Cease unconditional support for the war in Gaza and start thinking more creatively about how to pressure Israel into taking up Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s recently reiterated offer to negotiate.

As horribly polarized as the Israel-Palestine debate seems, there actually is space for productive coalition-building that can contribute toward the cause of peace. Let’s not let the extremist voices in the discourse distract us from that fact.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission chair today made a final plea to Congress, asking for money to continue a broadband-affordability program that gave out its last round of $30 discounts to people with low incomes in April. The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) has lowered monthly Internet bills for people who qualify for benefits, but Congress allowed funding to run out. People may receive up to $14 in May if their ISP opted into offering a partial discount during the program's final month. After that there will be no financial help for the 23 million households enrolled in the program. "Additional funding from Congress is the only near-term solution for keeping the ACP going," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wrote in a letter to members of Congress today. "If additional funding is not promptly appropriated, the one in six households nationwide that rely on this program will face rising bills and increasing disconnection. In fact, according to our survey of ACP beneficiaries, 77 percent of participating households report that losing this benefit would disrupt their service by making them change their plan or lead to them dropping Internet service entirely." The ACP started with $14.2 billion allocated by Congress in late 2021. The $30 monthly ACP benefit replaced the previous $50 monthly subsidy from the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ArsTechnica: Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe. Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Razer will have to fork over $1.1 million in refunds to customers who purchased its RGB-clad Zephyr face mask, according to a proposed settlement announced by the Federal Trade Commission on Monday. The company claimed the face mask used N95-grade filters, but the FTC alleges Razer never submitted them for testing and only “stopped the false advertising following negative press coverage and consumer outrage at the deceptive claims.”

Razer first released its Zephyr face mask in 2021 as a nifty, cyberpunk-esque alternative to traditional face masks worn during the covid-19 pandemic. Although Razer initially marketed the $100 mask as having N95-grade filters, it scrubbed any mention of the grade after YouTuber Naomi Wu tore down the mask and found that it wasn’t N95 certified after all. N95 masks are supposed to filter out at least 95 percent of airborne particles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Razer also planned on launching a $150 Zephyr Pro with a voice amplification feature, but that never panned out. At the time, Razer addressed claims about its Zephyr masks, saying in a post on X that “the Razer Zephyr and Zephyr Pro are not medical devices, respirators, surgical masks, or personal protective equipment (PPE) and are not meant to be used in medical or clinical settings.”

The FTC alleges that Razer made misleading statements about the mask on social media and product pages and also claims Razer never had it tested by the Food and Drug Administration or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The Verge reached out to Razer with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

“These businesses falsely claimed, in the midst of a global pandemic, that their face mask was the equivalent of an N95 certified respirator,” Samuel Levine, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “The FTC will continue to hold accountable businesses that use false and unsubstantiated claims to target consumers who are making decisions about their health and safety.”

The FTC’s proposed settlement also requires Razer to pay a civil penalty of $100,000 and bans the company from making “COVID-related health misrepresentations” and other “unsubstantiated health claims.” So, if you purchased one of these masks, you might be getting your money back.