lies

Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has been hit with the largest ever fine against it for its business practices.

A judge in New Mexico on Wednesday ordered the company to pay $25bn (£18.6bn) following a two week trial earlier this year that found it had spent years lying to the public about how it handled Facebook user data.

“The lies extend beyond Facebook’s data practices as well,” the judge said, adding they went to “the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.”

The fine is the largest to date against Meta, which has either been fined or agreed to settle several other lawsuits this year, including an $18bn deal with California over child safety.

The lawsuit stemmed from the role of Meta, then known as Facebook, in what became known as the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

That firm utilized data and information from millions of Facebook users as part of its work in political consulting, including on work related to the 2016 US Presidential election, which saw Donald Trump elected for the first time.

The US Federal Trade Commission in 2019 levied a $5bn fine against the company over its data privacy practices.

Lawyers for New Mexico sued the company over many statements Meta executives had made over the years that user data was never shared with or accessed by third parties without a user’s permission, when in reality it had been.

They claimed that the entire population of the state, roughly 2 million people, was impacted by Meta’s dishonesty regarding the way it controlled user data. A jury found that Meta had violated state laws more than 40 million times.

“For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said Wednesday.

“Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.”

The state lawyers sought up to $40bn in fines against Meta. Meta had argued anything beyond $3.4bn would be unconstitutional.

Judge Francis Mathew on Wednesday was direct in his decision to fine Meta an amount roughly equal to its profits each quarter.

He said Meta’s violations of law and misrepresentations to the public about how their Facebook data was used and shared were “willful” and spanned “more than 11 years,” stretching from 2010 to 2021.

Communications between senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were “designed to mislead the public,” Judge Mathew wrote in his order.

While the full amount of the penalty against Meta, based on thousands of violations of state law, was calculated as $219bn, Judge Mathew reduced the penalty to the $25bn fine.

A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

New Mexico has been one of Meta’s most notable adversaries in court. The state this year also fined Meta almost $1bn for misleading the public about the safety of its social media platforms for children.

The judge overseeing that lawsuit ultimately compared Meta to an industrial polluter of the air, with its form of pollution being “the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children.”

California and several other states had collectively sued Meta over similar issues related to a lack of child safety features on Meta’s platforms and resulting harms to children.

Meta and the states reached a mutual settlement deal, which did not include a fine or any admission of wrongdoing, to end that case only a few days into what was expected to be a multi-week trial.

A former research engineer who worked closely with Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos says “You Can See Everything” doesn’t show, well, everything.

You may remember Tyler Shultz from HBO’s “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” or even the fictionalized series “The Dropout” starring Amanda Seyfried as the disgraced Theranos CEO. He was one of the whistleblowers who raised the alarm when Holmes’ blood-testing technology was not the revolutionary medical device she claimed it to be. Shultz met Holmes through his grandfather, former Secretary of State George Shultz, who sat on the Theranos board of directors and scored Shultz an internship at the medical diagnostic startup, which quickly evolved into a full-time position as a research engineer. During his eight months on the job, he realized something was terribly wrong.

“You Can See Everything” directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim may have fallen into Holmes’ carefully curated trap, Shultz warns in a new essay.

“I’ve had the displeasure of watching disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes at work not just over a three-hour film, but over the entirety of my adult life. I was an employee turned whistleblower at Theranos, my grandfather sat on her board, she came to my family holidays and birthday parties. I met her when I was 20, she went to prison when I was 32,” he wrote in a Stat News op-ed published Monday.

“I wish I could have told director Nathan Fielder what I told [New York Times reporter] John Carreyrou when he started investigating her: Do not underestimate Elizabeth Holmes.”

Los Angeles Times columnist Glenn Whipp wrote that the film leaves viewers with many questions: “about Holmes, about the slippery nature of truth and about the objectivity of documentary filmmaking itself.” The film, labeled a documentary, grossed $15 million this weekend, making it the second-highest-grossing opening for the genre.

But Shultz says that while “You Can See Everything” is an entertaining piece of art, it’s certainly not a documentary, and “it’s dangerous to pretend that it is.”

Shultz calls out what he says are misleading components of the film, including the blood-testing device that Holmes shows Fielder.

“Back to the Theranos device itself. During that scene, my wife had to squeeze my arm to prevent me from jumping out of my seat in the theater and screaming, ‘THAT IS NOT THE DEVICE,’” Shultz writes. “That was not the device I worked with 12 hours a day, not the device we hid from regulators, not the device that constantly failed quality controls, not the device we used to knowingly give patients inaccurate medical results. The device she showed Fielder on the kitchen table was not the reason she went to prison. Elizabeth showed him a future version of the Theranos product that was never completed and never used in order to lead Fielder down this BS semantic rabbit hole and to trick him into litigating the entirely wrong thing.”

The research engineer-turned-whistleblower also called out the quaint two-bedroom condo in which the film was shot, pointing out that Holmes had just recently lived with partner Billy Evans, whose family owns a luxury resort in San Diego, in an estate listed at $125 million.

He also raises questions about the abuse Holmes suffered at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, convicted fraudster and Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. Shultz claims Holmes spotted Balwani’s abusive tendencies and clocked him as the perfect fall guy if things went south.

THE heartbroken sister of Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s ex has slammed her over what she claims are lies about their relationship and his sudden death, The U.S. Sun can reveal.

Autumn Urker, 31, alleges her brother Ken had split from Gypsy weeks before he died and claims she WASN’T the one who raised the alarm before his body was discovered.

Ken, who shared one-year-old daughter Aurora with Gypsy, was found dead in his bed at his Louisiana home on Thursday, his 34th birthday.

Gypsy said her final message to Ken was a “Happy Birthday” text and claimed she became concerned when he failed to respond.

But speaking exclusively to The U.S. Sun, Ken’s sister Autumn blasted what she described as “lies” surrounding his death and relationship with Gypsy.

She said, “Gypsy had no right to lie and say that it was because of some text that she sent to him.”

A police report obtained by The U.S. Sun shows other family members contacted authorities.

Autumn claimed Gypsy had been telling people “they were engaged and planning a baby number two,” but “none of that was true.”

“They were not together,” Autumn said.

Asked when they split, Autumn said it was “over a month ago” and claimed Ken was the one who ended the relationship.

She said, “When he was like, ‘I’m done,’ she’d do a thing, and so it was a fight whenever they split.”

Following Ken’s sudden death, Gypsy shared an emotional tribute describing him as her “greatest love story” and saying he would “forever be my soulmate and my red string.”

But Autumn hit back, saying, “It’s a slap in the face. You don’t have to lie and make it seem like something.”

The U.S. Sun has reached out to Gypsy for comment.

Gypsy has also said she believes Ken died of an overdose, although she said she did not know whether it was intentional.

Police records obtained by The U.S. Sun list the incident as an “overdose,” but an official cause and manner of death have not yet been released.

A handgun was also found in a holster beside his bed.

Asked whether she believed her brother’s death was intentional, Autumn said, “Accident. So I have more details, so we’re just keeping [them] private.”

The police records also give a fuller account of how Ken was found.

The report says Gypsy’s half-brother Dylan Blanchard and his wife Anita decided to check on Ken and contacted the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office after becoming concerned about his behavior the night before and learning from his boss, Justin Daigle, that he had not shown up for work.

Dylan reached an unlocked bedroom window and spotted Ken unconscious on his bed.

Dylan and Justin then moved the blinds and climbed through the window, where Justin touched Ken and discovered he was cold and not breathing, the report reads.

The records do not state that Gypsy was at the home when Ken was discovered or that she was the person who contacted authorities.

Deputies reported finding syringes and a spoon next to a “brown powdery substance” in the bathroom.

Another syringe was found on the nightstand beside Ken’s bed, along with a handgun, according to the report.

Autumn revealed she had spoken to Ken just hours earlier, with their conversation continuing past midnight.

She said, “He said he just had to work, he was going home, he was tired, so he was going to go to sleep, and then he had work in the morning.”

Their final conversation ended as their calls normally did.

Autumn recalled, “‘I love you’ — it just… That’s how we hang up the phone, you know, we say that we love each other. He didn’t say anything weird.”

Autumn also revealed Ken had been deeply troubled by the reaction to an old prison phone call between him and Gypsy that resurfaced online shortly before his death.

She said, “He asked me what I thought about the phone call that everybody’s been playing this past week, calling him the most sick things, and I told him he wasn’t that guy.”

Autumn said the cyberbullying Ken faced had taken a toll.

She recalled Ken asking her, “Is this call weird?” before she reassured him, “No, it was not weird.”

Autumn said they had plans to meet for dinner or “something” on his birthday before he was found unresponsive.

Paying tribute to her brother, Autumn said, “My brother was a great man. He was the kind of man that tried to love the broken. He was the kind of man that believed without demanding proof.”

She described Ken as a loving father, brother, son and friend who made people feel heard, adding that their mother was “devastated.”

Ken first contacted Gypsy in 2017 after watching Mommy Dead and Dearest while she was serving prison time for her role in the murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard.

The pair later rekindled their romance and welcomed Aurora in December 2024.