The Morning After: Trump announces lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
He says the tech giants violated his First Amendment rights.
More than two months since Facebook's Oversight Board said its suspension of the former president was "appropriate,” Donald Trump announced yesterday he plans to file lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
The move was teased earlier yesterday by Axios. Trump announced the legal bid at a press conference in Bedminster, New Jersey, promising the case would lead to an "end of the shadow banning, a stop to the silencing and the canceling that you know so well." He says the tech giants violated his First Amendment rights. Trump and his lawyers are planning to file the lawsuits in the Southern District of Florida.
During his presidency, Trump battled big tech pretty frequently. His executive order in 2020 tried to limit the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for what users posted online.
While it was billed as an attempt to prevent online censorship of political ideas, it came shortly after Twitter fact-checked a Trump tweet that claimed mail-in ballots were guaranteed to be "substantially" fraudulent. President Biden revoked this just over a month ago.
— Mat Smith
BMW's futuristic electric scooter is straight out of anime
It's a wild design concept made real.
When we saw BMW's CE 04 electric scooter concept last year, it looked like something pulled straight out of a science fiction film — as concepts often do. Now the company has unveiled the final consumer version of the CE 04, and while it's lost a little bit of sci-fi sparkle, it still looks more than futuristic enough. The CE 04 features a 10.25-inch LCD screen (that's bigger than what's in most cars), up to 81 miles of range and a top speed of 75MPH. It'll be available in 2022 for around $16,000. And yes, that’s definitely more than the top Vespa. Continue reading.
Assassin's Creed could become an online service game
Misconduct claims at Ubisoft may hurt 'Infinity,' however.
Bloomberg sources claim Ubisoft is developing Assassin's Creed Infinity, a project that turns the alternate history (and assassination) series into a live online service more like Grand Theft Auto Online or Fallout 76 — hopefully more the former than the latter. Instead of playing solo in one historical period, you would join other players across "multiple settings" that would grow and evolve over time. You'd have a reason to keep playing (and keep paying) for a longer time, compared to current AC entries, which rely heavily on DLC. Continue reading.
Moderna enters clinical trials for its mRNA-based flu vaccine
The same tech that stopped COVID cold could save us from seasonal sniffles.
Moderna has injected its mRNA-derived vaccine for the seasonal flu into a human volunteer for the first time as part of a Phase 1/2 clinical study, the company announced on Wednesday. According to the World Health Organization, the flu strains that this vaccine could treat cause between 3 and 5 million severe cases of flu every year.
This is a very early test for the new vaccine technology, geared primarily towards building a baseline understanding of the treatment's "safety, reactogenicity and immunogenicity," according to a Moderna release. Continue reading.
OnePlus’ latest phones throttle performance on popular apps
The company says it introduced the limit to improve battery life.
Not learning the lessons of the past, OnePlus is apparently throttling the capabilities of its Snapdragon 888 processors. The company admitted it limits the power of the processor when it’s used by apps like Chrome, Twitter and WhatsApp, following an in-depth report from Anandtech. However, neither the OnePlus 9 Pro nor the OnePlus 9 throttle any benchmarking tools. GeekBench, one of the more popular tools for benchmarking, has subsequently delisted both phones.
Back in 2017, with the OnePlus 3T, the company included code that artificially boosted the clock speeds of the phone's Snapdragon processor when running certain benchmark apps. And then, XDA caught the company doing something similar with the OnePlus 5. Continue reading.
But wait, there’s more...
TikTok tests letting US users apply for jobs with video resumes
36 states launch an antitrust suit against Google over the Play Store
Engadget Deals: Apple's Mac Mini M1 is back on sale for $600 at Amazon
Grubhub and Yandex bring autonomous deliveries to US college campuses
