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Florida free speech law somehow violates free speech | Google asked to cease collection of location data in run up to expected Roe VS Wade reversal
Hello people, and welcome to the most powerful thing in your inbox right now (read to the end to get the full effect).
Special note: this week is a little on the light side because I had a huge deadline today — just be glad you’re getting anything at all and no I am not sorry about all the errors in grammar. Good day.
This week was sort of okay I guess 🤷. Yes, the watery indecisive rating at the chewy centre of my five-point scale. But why?
The US democrats are using soft power (even though… they have hard power now) to prevent Google from collecting location data that may identify those seeking abortions.
The US republicans do not understand free speech, yet try to make laws about them…
Microsoft have had a developer conference and announced a no-code app building tool (so what do you need developers for then??)
🙃 Everyone who wants free speech doesn’t know what free speech is?
Right so… in the USA, they have this thing called ‘The Constitution’, and it allows people to avoid thinking for themselves. It’s so easy — someone wants to pass a law (or go shopping or something), and all you have to do is check that it’s constitutional to figure out if they should or shouldn’t be allowed to continue.
Now that you understand exactly how the US constitution works, let me update you on a law that the state of Florida has tried to pass:
It started in January 2021, when Trump was removed from Twitter for basically inciting an insurrection, the little scamp
The governor of Florida considered the Trump ban to be the final nail in the coffin that he refers to as censorship… so he made a law about it.
The law was called the ‘Stop Social Media Censorship Act’ and essentially said that social media platforms should not be allowed to ban political candidates or uh… ‘journalistic enterprises’ (like Infowars? Idk).
⚡ Shocking: a federal judge has now ruled that this law, which apparently was meant to protect free speech, is actually a violation of free speech.
That is because social media platforms have the right to enforce their own community guidelines; stopping them from doing so would restrict their freedom of expression (you know… according to the constitution, a thing written before Facebook).
☝️ For those of you who are on the fence about this, or who do actually think social media platforms should not have the power to ban people:
Free speech works like this: you can say whatever you want, but I don’t have to like it, and I can complain at you for all your opinions until you give up or die.
So that means, if I ran my own social media, I could make up my own rules about who gets to say what — because that’s free speech
Anyone in the west who thinks that they do not have the freedom to express themselves… is wrong.
This all reminds me of that bizarre Texas law I wrote about last week — it says that you cannot censor someone based on their ‘viewpoint’, which is so vague, it kind of means no content should be moderated at all (even live streams of mass shootings).
Of course, all of this noise is centered around the idea that social media is completely skewed towards the left, and thus the algorithms that govern what we see on news feeds are set to consistently suppress conservative voices. No, you silly conservatives, you’ve got it wrong: when people talk about ‘algorithmic bias’ they usually mean that the bias is against groups that you hate (you know… non-white people, queer people, etc) — not bias against conservatives. Jeez.
💪 Lawmakers have asked Google to stop collecting quite so much data… good for them for trying!
This segment was meant to be much longer but basically, the US Democrats would like Google to stop collecting location data which could be used to find people who want to have an abortion. Sure okay… and I would like to live in a reality where Alison Brie gives me a life-changing orgasm everyday.
Obviously their concerns are valid, because women in the US do not have bodily autonomy. But my question is why only focus on Google, and why only on location data? All Big Tech firms have the power and the data to make inferences about people, and use it against them — the democrats need to broaden their scope (or… I dunno?? Codify the Roe VS Wade ruling into law?? Maybe??)
🙄 Something something ‘build faster with no code’
It’s that time of year again: where Big Tech companies have their developer conferences, and tell the world what technologies will ruin/improve our lives, no matter how hard we resist/embrace.
Today I’m going to chat about something that caught my eye from Microsoft’s Build conference: they want to make it easier to build websites and apps with ‘Power Pages’ and ‘Power Apps Express Design’. A brief overview:
Power Pages helps you build website easily in a low-code environment
Power Apps Express Design lets you import design files (e.g. any old image full of rectangles and gradients) and turn it straight into a working app
A brief opinion: we don’t need more apps. We don’t need more websites. We don’t need to make it easier to build either of these. Go outside. Go sit on the grass. Go jump in the sea. Stop building apps and websites.
That’s the end — well done for getting to the bottom. I hope you soaked up some useful information to regurgitate at the pub over the weekend. Ciao x