Meta had 17-STRIKE policy for sex traffickers, ex-employee says



A former safety lead for one of Mark Zuckerberg's social media apps alleged the company is not very strict when it comes to those who engaged in human trafficking.

The claim comes from a plaintiff's brief filed as part of a lawsuit against Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. The lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California alleges that the social apps "relentlessly" pursued growth at all costs and "recklessly" ignored the impacts their products have on the mental health of children.

'You could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation.'

Vaishnavi Jayakumar, Instagram's former head of safety and well-being, testified that she was shocked when she learned Meta had a "17x" strike policy toward those who reportedly engaged in "trafficking of humans for sex."

"You could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation, and upon the 17th violation, your account would be suspended," Jayakumar claimed. The former employee also said that she considered it to be a "very, very high strike threshold" in comparison to the rest of the industry and that internal documentation from Meta corroborated her claim.

As Time reported, plaintiffs in the case claim that Jayakumar raised the issue in 2020 but was told it was too difficult to address. This reportedly came at the same time it was allegedly much easier to report users for violations surrounding spam, "intellectual property violation," and the "promotion of firearms."

In a statement, Meta strongly denied the claims.

RELATED: Florida attorney general announces lawsuit against Snapchat for allegedly empowering child predators

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"We strongly disagree with these allegations, which rely on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions in an attempt to present a deliberately misleading picture," a Meta spokesperson told Time.

"The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens — like introducing Teen Accounts with built-in protections and providing parents with controls to manage their teens' experiences. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, and we stand by our record."

Still, the lawsuit claims Meta was aware of the harms its platforms caused and even knew about millions of adults who were trying to contact minors through its apps.

Moreover, the lawsuit also alleges that Meta halted internal research that would have shown those who stopped using Facebook became less depressed or anxious, NBC News reported.

The study, reportedly titled Project Mercury, was allegedly initiated in 2019 as a way to help "explore the impact" that Meta apps have on "polarization, news consumption, well-being, and daily social interactions."

RELATED: Blaze News investigates: Is social media really a 'breeding ground for predators' — or are we worrying too much?

Additionally, the lawsuit compares the social media sites to "tobacco," likening the platforms to cigarette companies marketing their products to kids.

A Google spokesperson said the lawsuit "fundamentally misunderstand how YouTube works and the allegations are simply not true."

"YouTube is a streaming service where people come to watch everything from live sports to podcasts to their favorite creators, primarily on TV screens, not a social network where people go to catch up with friends," the Google spokesperson stated. "We've also developed dedicated tools for young people, guided by child safety experts, that give families control."

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'It is bewitching'

Zuckerberg's vision: US military AI and tech around the world



Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is sharing the wealth with U.S. allies in Europe and NATO.

Since late 2024, Zuckerberg's tech giant has made Llama — its own large language model — available to foreign countries within the Five Eyes security partnership between the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Now, Meta is expanding the access to other countries while partnering with advanced-AI military contractors.

'We're building for completely on-device deployment of AI.'

Wearable products, AI programs, and other tools are being shared with allies in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea, in order to enhance "decision-making, mission-specific capabilities, and operational efficiency," Meta wrote.

The technology includes a partnership with Anduril, Palmer Luckey's industry-leading augmented reality defense company.

Calling the effort the "largest of its kind," Meta's partnership is meant to equip soldiers with enhanced decision-making capabilities. This is apparent with Anduril's recently released EagleEye, an AI/AR warfighter helmet.

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EdgeRunner AI is used on a military laptop. Image provided to Blaze News courtesy of EdgeRunner

EagleEye represents the best of what the video game world has to offer, brought to life.

Not only does the helmet display directional mapping as if belonging to a gamer dropped into a first-person shooting game, but it also provides a form of X-ray vision that allows users to see allies and enemies on the map through coordinated data.

The AR tech also utilizes spatial audio and frequency detection to alert operators of hidden threats. Rear and flank sensors also ensure that the allied soldier is not ambushed.

Anduril's Lattice AI is also making waves, and it too looks like something gamers will recognize.

Using data from drones, sensors, and satellites, it creates a real-time 3D battlefield map. The program boasts a wide range of deployable formats, including detecting battlefield threats or intrusions on border security.

In November 2024, Meta opened-sourced its Llama model for the U.S. military and its contractors to build upon. That move is now paying off, as Meta will now share what the company EdgeRunner has built, a closed-ended chatbot for soldiers.

RELATED: 'Insane radical leftists' are gone: Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey reunite for US military project

Anduril Lattice battlefield software. Photo by John Keeble/Getty Images

EdgeRunner AI is essentially a search function for soldiers; it can be run as a local program on almost any consumer-grade device, and according to Meta, it can be used to identify safe locations for aircraft or even accurately translate languages.

"This is all part of our joint effort to ensure the warfighter has access to advanced AI technology at the tactical edge," an EdgeRunner spokesperson told Return. "What's especially unique about our work with Meta is that we're building for completely on-device deployment of AI, meaning it's running locally on your laptop, workstation, or smartphone, disconnected from the cloud."

This method avoids the necessity for uninterrupted cloud connectivity, which helps keep the data out of the enemy's hands, too.

The AI program has an all-encompassing goal and is specifically designed to be adaptable to different job titles. This means it will be coupled with logistics, maintenance, and combat roles.

Meta is spreading its footprint worldwide and said because of this, it hopes allies will deploy the AI ethically, responsibly, and in accordance with "relevant international law and fundamental principles."

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Europe shows us what happens when bureaucrats win



Americans are accustomed to innovation improving their lives. From smartphones to artificial intelligence, breakthroughs keep coming — and most of them happen in the United States, where freedom fuels invention. But across the Atlantic, the story is very different. Europe’s regulators have built a bureaucracy that smothers creativity.

The lesson is simple: Innovation thrives where government steps back, not where it rules from Brussels.

Europe doesn’t need more commissions or consultations. It needs courage to scrap bad laws and let innovation breathe again.

A recent analysis from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation drives home the point. All seven of the world’s trillion-dollar tech firms are American. Europe can claim only 28 companies worth more than $100 billion. Over the past decade, European firms raised about $426 billion — $800 billion less than their U.S. counterparts.

Rather than learn from failure, Brussels tightened its grip — proving again that when regulators fail, they regulate harder. Their Digital Markets Act and Copyright Directive saddle companies with costly mandates that make life harder for both innovators and consumers.

EU regulators insist that their rules ensure fairness, transparency, and competition. In reality, they’re strangling convenience and driving users crazy.

Take Google Maps. Because of DMA rules, Europeans can no longer click directly into expanded map views. As one user complained on Reddit, it’s become “a severe pain in the butt.” The new restrictions also hobble tourism. Google Search can’t link directly to airlines or hotels, forcing travelers through clunky intermediaries that waste time and money.

The Copyright Directive makes things worse. It tells search engines to display only “very short” snippets of news articles — without defining what that means. Bureaucrats promise to judge “the impact on the effectiveness of the new right,” which means nothing. By contrast, American courts have long recognized that snippets are fair use and help people find what they need. U.S. policy treats information as a public good; the EU treats it as a privilege controlled by the state.

The damage goes beyond search results. The EU now forces Apple and other “gatekeepers” to make their devices interoperable with third-party software — a costly demand that undermines engineering efficiency. Features like iPhone-to-Mac mirroring and real-time translation could disappear from European markets because of it.

As Cato Institute’s Jennifer Huddleston noted, “The real-time translation feature would be immensely helpful in Europe with so many languages; however, the consequence of European regulation is that it might not be available.”

RELATED: Can anyone save America from European-style digital ID?

Photo by Lab Ky Mo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

And when companies don’t comply fast enough, Brussels slaps them with massive fines. Apple got hit with 500 million euros (around $580 million), Meta with 200 million euros (around $232 million) — punished not for misconduct but for trying to innovate.

The EU now says it will review whether the DMA “achieves its objectives of ensuring contestable and fair digital markets.” That’s bureaucratic code for “we might make it worse.” Meanwhile, the Copyright Directive’s vague language grows even more dangerous in the age of AI, where machine learning depends on large-scale data use that Brussels can’t seem to comprehend.

Europe doesn’t need more commissions or consultations. It needs courage to scrap bad laws and let innovation breathe again. If Brussels wants to compete with America, it should stop punishing success and start trusting its own entrepreneurs. A lighter-touch approach has worked for the United States — and it could save Europe from technological irrelevance.

AI isn’t feeding you



Mason County, Kentucky, sits just an hour from Cincinnati but feels like another world. Its beautiful rolling hills, deep farming roots, and traditions make it a bastion of conservative culture. Trump carried the county by 44 points. Residents distrust globalism, Big Tech, and government collusion.

Yet Mason has become the latest target for one of the largest data centers in the world. The company behind it hides its name, cloaks officials in nondisclosure agreements, and dangles cash at landowners while refusing to reveal how it will feed the massive hunger for power and water.

The question now is whether Kentucky — and America — will heed the warning or allow ‘progress’ to consume the very land, food, water, and power that make progress possible.

The plan calls for a sprawling 5,000-acre “technology campus” near Big Pond and Tuckahoe roads. Local officials admit the buyer is a Fortune 20 giant, described only as a “global, top 10” company with “hundreds of thousands of employees.”

Residents say the tactics are familiar. A few landowners get offers — $35,000 an acre in this case — while the broader community is left to bear the burden: displaced farmland, strained resources, and declining property values. Good luck selling to anyone but the data-center developer once the deal is in motion.

Power drain

The proposed complex in Maysville would demand 2.2 gigawatts of power, starting at 110 megawatts by 2026 and hitting full capacity by 2028-2031. That’s the annual energy use of 1.8 million American homes. For a county of 17,000 people, the numbers are staggering. The project alone would nearly double the East Kentucky Power Cooperative’s yearly output.

And that’s before accounting for water. Data centers require enormous cooling systems that siphon off local supplies. Add in the direct loss of 5,000 acres of farmland and timberland — in a nation already facing record-low cattle herds and shrinking food security — and the price tag for “progress” keeps rising.

By comparison, the average coal plant sits on 585 acres; a natural gas plant, only 30. Those facilities power the nation. This one would devour power and water to feed servers.

A national trend

This isn’t just about Mason County. Hyperscale data centers are sprouting everywhere with the help of state and federal officials eager to rezone farmland. Twenty such facilities are already planned for Kentucky, 10 for Ohio, and 35 for Indiana. Each site removes productive farmland, stresses infrastructure, and hands more of the food and energy supply to giant corporations.

The sales pitch is always the same: jobs and economic development. Yet the real math looks different. The U.S. lost more than 100,000 beef-cow operations between 2017 and 2022. Farmers face higher feed costs, tighter margins, and competition from giant meat-packers. Now, Big Tech threatens to take what’s left.

Cronyism exposed

Mason County Judge-Executive Owen McNeill and other officials signed NDAs while promoting the deal. Residents see it for what it is: promises of prosperity in exchange for their land, heritage, and way of life. On Facebook, 1,500 locals in “We Are Mason County” compare it to a Nigerian prince scam — big promises, little proof, and huge risks.

The scam extends to Frankfort. House Bill 775 exempts data centers from Kentucky’s 6% sales and use tax for 50 years. Servers, networking equipment, cooling systems — all tax-free. Farmers pay sales tax on every tractor and plow, but Google and Meta lobbied for an endless free ride.

RELATED: Time to pump the brakes on Big Tech’s AI boondoggle

Photo by BlackJack3D via Getty Images

Land, food, water, power

At stake are the four essentials of civilization. Land grows food. Water sustains life. Power keeps the lights on. Once given away, none of these can be reclaimed. The boosters of artificial intelligence say America must have the infrastructure for it at any cost. But if AI can’t survive without tax breaks, secrecy, and the seizure of farmland, maybe it isn’t the inevitable juggernaut Silicon Valley claims.

Mason County itself bears the name of George Mason, the anti-Federalist who warned that monopolies in trade and commerce would mean “no Security for ... the People for their Rights.” He did not live to see global monopolies seizing farmland in Kentucky, but he predicted the danger.

The question now is whether Kentucky — and America — will heed the warning or allow “progress” to consume the very land, food, water, and power that make progress possible.

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Why is Trump’s Justice Department carrying water for Obama’s visa scam?



Donald Trump’s base has reached a clear conclusion: The entire importation of white-collar workers from India was a scam. It replaced American workers, fueled outsourcing to India, and boosted its economy at the expense of our own.

The labor market is so weak that even legal visa programs should be suspended under Trump’s 212(f) authority. Yet the H-1B and L visa pipelines remain open, and worse, the Trump Justice Department is defending one of Obama’s most lawless expansions: the H-4 spousal work program.

Defending Obama’s H-4 visa scheme undermines both the law and the American workforce.

Save Jobs USA, representing American workers, has sued the government for continuing Obama’s program that grants work permits to H-1B spouses on H-4 visas. Congress authorized the H-4 visa, but it never authorized work permits. Obama simply created them in 2015 by executive fiat.

Because the program is untethered from statutory limits, it has no cap. While the U.S. still issues around 120,000 H-1B visas each year — including under Trump — hundreds of thousands of spouses now work illegally in the same industries, displacing Americans. Most are funneled into the tech sector, overwhelmingly from India.

This lawsuit has been winding through the courts for nearly a decade. It began after Southern California Edison fired American workers and replaced them with H-1B visa holders. Both district and appellate courts in D.C. sided with the government. Now, as the case reaches the Supreme Court, Trump’s Justice Department filed a brief — signed off by Pam Bondi — arguing that plaintiffs lack standing to sue.

“Petitioner did not identify a single member who is ‘suffering immediate or threatened injury’ that is fairly traceable to the 2015 rule,” government lawyers wrote last month.

Even if one debates the technicalities of standing, why would Bondi waste resources defending a program that is plainly illegal and harmful to American workers — the opposite of what Trump promised in 2015?

A broader failure on foreign labor

Seven months into the new administration, the broader picture looks grim. The White House has failed to slow worker visa programs outside of narrow national security concerns. Trump has not invoked his 212(f) authority to halt needless foreign labor. Instead, he has floated the idea of importing 600,000 Chinese students — an economic and national security risk rolled into one.

This is the worst possible time to flood the market with foreign workers. The economy has averaged just 35,000 new jobs a month, the weakest pace since the Great Recession. Entry-level job listings are down 15% while applications are up 30%. The class of 2024 is still struggling: 41% underemployed, 58% still searching.

Tech companies, meanwhile, continue layoffs by the tens of thousands this year even as they lobby for more H-1Bs:

  • Intel: 21,000
  • Panasonic: 10,000
  • Meta: 3,600
  • Hewlett-Packard: 2,000
  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise: 2,500
  • IBM: 8,000
  • PayPal: 2,500
  • Dell: 12,500
  • TCS: 12,000

Why would they seek more visas in the middle of layoffs? Because nearly half of H-1Bs go to outsourcing and staffing firms, which feed India’s tech industry while hollowing out our own. Each expansion of the visa pipeline means more outsourcing, not more prosperity for Americans.

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Blaze Media illustration

The corporate capture

The deeper problem is the growing partnership between this administration and multinational tech giants. The government even owns a 10% equity stake in Intel. Palantir, which holds sensitive defense and health databases, has been allowed to staff up with foreign workers who now handle American taxpayers’ critical data.

Against this backdrop, Bondi’s defense of Obama’s illegal spousal work program looks less like a legal technicality and more like a political signal: This administration is drifting from Trump’s 2015 America First promises and closer to the “America Last” priorities of multinational corporations.

Back to 2015’s warning

The case against foreign workers is even stronger now than when Trump rode down that golden escalator a decade ago. The economy is weaker, the job market tighter, and the outsourcing racket more blatant. Defending Obama’s H-4 visa scheme undermines both the law and the American workforce.

The administration needs to remember what brought Trump to power in the first place. Stop importing foreign labor. Shut down lawless programs. Put American workers first.

Time to pump the brakes on Big Tech’s AI boondoggle



America already learned a lesson from the Green New Deal: If an industry survives only on special favors, it isn’t ready to stand on its own.

Yet the same game is playing out again — this time for artificial intelligence. The wealthiest companies in history now demand tax breaks, zoning carve-outs, and energy favors on a scale far greater than green energy firms ever did.

Instead of slamming on the accelerator, Washington should be hitting the brakes.

If AI is truly the juggernaut its backers claim, it should thrive on its merits. Technology designed to enhance human life shouldn’t need human subsidies to survive — or to enrich its corporate patrons.

An unnatural investment

Big Tech boosters insist that we stand on the brink of artificial general intelligence, a force that could outthink and even replace humans. No one denies AI’s influence or its future promise, but does that justify the avalanche of artificial investment now driving half of all U.S. economic growth?

The Trump administration continues to hand out favors to Big Tech to fuel a bubble that may never deliver. As the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip pointed out earlier this month, the largest companies once dominated because their profits came from low-cost, intangible assets such as software, platforms, and network effects. Users flocked to Facebook, Google, the iPhone, and Windows, and revenue followed — with little up-front infrastructure risk.

The AI model looks nothing like that. Instead of software that scales cheaply, Big Tech is sinking hundreds of billions into land, hardware, power, and water. These hyperscale data centers devour resources with little clarity about demand.

According to Ip’s data: Between 2016 and 2023, the free cash flow and net earnings of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft rose in tandem. Since 2023, however, net income is up 73% while free cash flow has dropped 30%.

“For all of AI’s obvious economic potential, the financial return remains a question mark,” Ip wrote. “OpenAI and Anthropic, the two leading stand-alone developers of large language models, though growing fast, are losing money.”

Andy Lawrence of the Uptime Institute explained the risk: “To suddenly start building data centers so much denser in power use, with chips 10 times more expensive, for unproven demand — all that is an extraordinary challenge and a gamble.”

The cracks are already beginning to show. GPT-5 has been a bust for the most part. Meta froze hiring in its AI division, with Mark Zuckerberg admitting that “improvement is slow for now.” Even TechCrunch conceded: Throwing more data and computing power at large language models won’t create a “digital god.”

Government on overdrive

Yet government keeps stepping on the gas, even as the industry stalls. The “Mag 7” companies spent $560 billion on AI-related capital expenditures in the past 18 months, while generating only $35 billion in revenue. IT consultancy Gartner projects $475 billion will be spent on data centers this year alone — a 42% jump from 2024. Those numbers make no sense without government intervention.

Consider the favors.

Rezoning laws. Data centers require sprawling land footprints. To make that possible, states and counties are bending rules never waived for power plants, roads, or bridges. Northern Virginia alone now hosts or plans more than 85 million square feet of data centers — equal to nearly 1,500 football fields. West Virginia and Mississippi have even passed laws banning local restrictions outright. Trump’s AI action plan ties federal block grants to removing zoning limits. Nothing about that is natural, balanced, fair, or free-market.

Tax exemptions. Nearly every state competing for data centers — including Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Nebraska — offers sweeping tax breaks. Alabama exempts data centers from sales, property, and income taxes for up to 30 years — for as few as 20 jobs. Oregon and Indiana also give property tax exemptions.

RELATED: Big Tech colonization is real — zoning laws are the last line of defense

Photo by the Washington Post via Getty Images

Regulatory carve-outs. Trump’s executive order calls for easing rules under the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and other environmental statutes. Conservatives rightly want fewer burdens across the board — but why should Big Tech’s server farms get faster relief than the power plants needed to supply them?

Federal land giveaways. The AI action plan also makes federal land available for private data centers, handing prime real estate to trillion-dollar corporations at taxpayer expense. No other industry gets this benefit.

Stop the scam

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) put it bluntly: “It’s one thing to use technology to enhance the human experience, but it’s another to have technology supplant the human experience.” Right now, AI resembles wind and solar in their early years — a speculative bubble kept alive only through taxpayer largesse.

If AI is truly the innovation its backers claim, it will thrive without zoning exemptions, tax shelters, and federal handouts. If it cannot survive without special favors, then it isn’t ready. Instead of slamming on the accelerator, Washington should be hitting the brakes.

No, Trump Hasn’t Gone Soft On Silicon Valley Monopolies

President Trump’s antitrust team isn’t pro-monopolies. It's pro-consumer, pro-competition, and pro-America.

Big Tech’s charm campaign flops as Trump’s DOJ brings the heat



Between soaring stock prices and a relatively new presidential administration stretched thin while putting out global fires, you might think Big Tech tyrants are enjoying a free pass. Has their censorship and collusion been quietly forgotten?

Perhaps not.

While consumers have clearly benefited from many Big Tech companies’ baseline goods and services, it’s evident that the companies have resorted to extralegal and unsavory measures to maintain and grow their market share.

Without the slightest fear of consequences, Silicon Valley monopolists spent years targeting dissenting voices — not just conservatives, but nearly anyone slightly out of tune with the far left. Those who refused to play along found social media accounts restricted — or even banned outright — while search engine algorithms buried websites so far down the results list that few would ever find them. This sinister practice became known as “shadow-banning.”

Ultimately, their plan to manipulate voting outcomes backfired. Despite their best efforts, Republicans swept 2024’s elections, and tech executives have conveniently made a late shift toward the GOP. Though their smiles flashed during President Trump’s inauguration were spun as a mark of a genuine change of sentiment, their real intentions were obvious: to cozy up to the new guys in power.

Luckily, despite seemingly chummy behavior, the Trump White House is going after Silicon Valley.

The Trump administration fights back

In late July, the Justice Department filed a landmark statement of interest in a case accusing mainstream media outlets of illegally colluding with social media giants to deplatform conservatives. Just two weeks before, a federal judge rejected Apple’s attempt to dismiss the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the company.

These are the latest examples of the tide turning against Big Tech. While the leaders have tried to cozy up to the Trump administration, their pleas have already fallen on deaf ears and will continue to do so.

While some are surprised by Trump’s efforts to rein in Big Tech, these moves are consistent with his philosophy.

In his first term, his Justice Department joined with 15 mostly Republican-leaning states to file an antitrust suit against Google.

Moreover, Vice President JD Vance historically has been a critic of Big Tech, even expressing support for the work of Lina Khan, President Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, who aggressively went after the largest offenders. Last year, Vance described Khan as “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.”

Personnel is policy, and thus it’s telling that one of Vance’s former staffers, Gail Slater, now heads the Justice Department’s antitrust division.

Slater, speaking about the suit against Google earlier this year, said, “In a time of political division in our nation, the case against Google brings everyone together.

"Nothing less than the future of the internet is at stake.”

No Big Tech sympathy there.

Biden’s anti-capitalist approach

However, Biden's and Trump’s approaches to antitrust issues have notable differences. Biden’s brigades wanted to either punish or scapegoat companies for reasons rooted in far-left economics.

In announcing the suit filed against Apple in March 2024, the Justice Department said the company’s net income “exceeds any other company in the Fortune 500 and the gross domestic products of more than 100 countries.”

Similarly, in announcing a case against Visa last year, the department cited the company’s operating income, operating margins, and network fees.

The implication is that the companies’ outsized earnings were evidence of their guilt.

The suit filed against Visa was particularly egregious. The company’s market share is only 60%, with no evidence of anti-competitive activity, and a raft of upstart competitors could lead that market share to decline.

Breitbart News reported that the suit was politically motivated (to scapegoat for Bidenflation). Biden administration officials hoped that the Southern District of New York would overlook the weak claims within the suit and proceed.

Trump’s pro-capitalist accountability

By contrast, Trump administration officials are looking to strengthen capitalism, not tear it down. “Big” should always merit skepticism, but Trump’s antitrust team knows it doesn’t always have to be bad. In the absence of unfair company practices, administration officials don’t want to interfere. They believe upholding law and order is the basis of antitrust law.

The tide is turning against Big Tech.

Thus, when a federal judge ruled in April that Google had violated antitrust law, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department would focus on “encroachments on free speech and free markets by tech companies.”

Apple and others certainly have plenty of evidence of that!

Honesty and transparency are fundamental to free markets. But both Google and Meta have admitted to failing on both counts. In May, Google agreed to pay a fine of $1.4 billion to Texas in response to two lawsuits that accused the company of privacy violations related to tracking users’ locations and searches.

Last year, Meta also paid $1.4 billion to Texas, following allegations that it had used facial recognition software without getting users’ permission to do so.

Honesty also means not rigging the rules in your favor. But that’s exactly what Google has been charged with in several antitrust cases. The company has lost three of these cases involving its app store, search engine, and advertising technology.

In some jurisdictions, it’s three strikes before you’re out. No wonder the Trump administration didn’t amend the Biden Justice Department’s call for Google to be broken up. Given how the tech giant now operates units ranging from YouTube to a self-driving taxi company, some say the company should break itself up.

RELATED: Congress has the power to crush Big Tech’s app monopoly

Photo by Bloomberg/Getty Images

Moreover, Apple’s brazen tactics have stood out among its Big Tech brethren. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that the company had “willfully” failed to comply with an earlier court order related to its app store. In trying to cover its tracks, the judge said Apple engaged in a “cover-up,” which included one employee lying under oath.

Justice for Americans

While consumers have clearly benefited from many Big Tech companies’ baseline goods and services, it’s evident the companies have resorted to extralegal and unsavory measures to try to maintain and grow their market share.

Their losses in the courts and their lack of support in the Trump administration are bad news for them, but great news for the American people.