A sign supporting the banning of data centers is seen outside of a home near the Meta Prometheus Campus, an AI data center and supercluster project, is seen on November 1, 2026 in New Albany, Ohio. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images)

Data Centers Were on the Ballot Across the US, and They Lost. What Comes Next?

Elon Musk listens as President Donald Trump speaks during an event at the US Institute of Peace, Oct. 8, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)

Pull the Plug on Technofascism Before It Reboots

Exterior view of the US headquarters of TikTok in Culver City, California, in 2022. Shutterstock

Exterior view of the US headquarters of TikTok in Culver City, California, in 2022. 

Social Media Addiction Cases Are Settling Before Trial. What Does It Mean?

Online Radicalization Concept with Digital Propaganda, Social Media Manipulation, Extremist Influence, Algorithmic Amplification, Hate Speech, Misinformation, Polarization and Online Safety Risks

Hate Speech Still Pays on YouTube. Regulators Should Follow the Money

Anti-data center demonstrators protest at the Pennsylvania Capitol, Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026, in Harrisburg, Pa. (AP Photo/Marc Levy)

Voters Handed Congress a Mandate to Confront Corporate Power and Technofascism

Democratic Senate candidate Texas state Rep. James Talarico concludes a victory speech at an election night event in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Democrats Target AI, Data Centers, Elon Musk and Big Tech in Midterm Victory Speeches

A protester hidden behind a poster with slogans against Meta holds a mask with the face of Mark Zuckerberg with devil horns over it. 

A protest outside Meta headquarters in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on October 19, 2026.  (Allison Sales/NurPhoto)

In Brazil, Lula's Army Fought Meta on Meta's Own Turf

A digital collage combining a historical painting of a miner with a large grid of small online images. At the center, a muscular miner works underground with a heavy drill inside a dark tunnel. To the left and along the bottom, hundreds of tiny square images form a dense mosaic, suggesting scraped internet content. A bright beam of light connects the image grid to the miner’s drill. On the right, a block of colorful digital noise contrasts with the detailed painting, reinforcing the link between physical mining and data extraction.

Primitive Accumulation by Daniela Zampieri / 

What the New AI Training Opt-Out Really Means

What Teenagers' AI Use Reveals About the EU Kids Act

A sunrise in the horizon over icy waters. 

The Ilulissat Ice fjord in Greenland, where rising temperatures are contributing to rapid glacier melt, July3, 2024. (Photo by Ulrik Pedersen/NurPhoto)

Good News and Bad News About AGI and Climate Change

A voter casts their ballot on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2026, in Atlanta, Georgia (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Protect Elections by Punishing Deception Narrowly, Not by Banning Technology

The Claude app icon is displayed on a computer screen photographed with a kaleidoscopic-effect filter in Creteil, France, on October 27, 2026, as Anthropic filed a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a planned initial public offering in the United States. (Photo by Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via AP)

The Incident Report Is Becoming a Building Block of AI Governance

A banner with a portrait of Elon Musk is carried by members of Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, an organization affiliated to Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), as they stage a protest against Elon Musk's Starlink, in New Delhi, India, Friday, Oct. 23, 2026. (AP Photo/Vipin)

Starlink, Reliance, and the Public Battle for India’s Orbit

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sits for a conversation with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center on September 15, 2026 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)

Don’t Let ‘Misaligned’ and ‘Rogue’ Agents Obscure Corporate Accountability in OpenAI–Hugging Face Probes

In this photo illustration, the icon for the AI app "Claude" by Anthropic is seen through running water as it is displayed on a digital screen on September 16, 2026 in London, England. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)



Anthropic Needs to Disclose Its Tokenomics Before Its IPO

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei looks on as United States President Donald Trump holds a press briefing with AI executives following a meeting on artificial intelligence, outside the West Wing of the White House on September 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The SEC Should Block Anthropic’s IPO to Protect the Public

Director of National Intelligence and recently named head of the Super Intelligence Task Force Jay Clayton attends a roundtable discussion hosted by President Donald Trump on cybercrime in the East Room of the White House on October 21, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

October 2026 US Tech Policy Roundup

A photo of a group of men in suits and ties gathered outdoors, speaking and smiling with trees in the background. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is in the foreground speaking with big hand gestures and eyes closed. 

President Trump, left, speaks with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic addresses reporters outside the White House, Sept. 29, 2026, in Washington DC. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

How AI Companies Want to Be Governed, and What That Means for AI Governance

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney shakes hands with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen following their closing news conference during the EU-Canada summit in Montreal on Friday, Oct. 30, 2026. (Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press via AP)

Europe and Canada Plot a Digital Alliance as US Ties Fray

Michael Kratsios, Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy attends Security Council meeting on Artificial intelligence and international security at UN Headquarters in New York, NY on September 23, 2026. (Photo by Lev Radin/Sipa USA via AP Images)

What’s Really Behind the Science Slowdown the White House Wants to Fix?

Varsha Bansal is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

 this week in Los Angeles Superior Court in another bellwether trial over social media addiction, where two teenage plaintiffs: Kadence, an 18-year-old from Mississippi and Shawna, a 16-year-old from Illinois, were going to have their cases tried together before a single jury. This jury would decide if Snapchat’s design harmed its young users.

But, Monday morning, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, 

 with both plaintiffs. TikTok and YouTube did the same, but weeks prior. The terms of these settlements remain confidential.

The plaintiffs, who are referred to only by their first names, had alleged that these companies made deliberate design choices making their products and platforms addictive and causing harm to young users like them.

“Our ultimate goal is to hold these social media companies accountable for how their ⁠actions have impacted millions of children across the country, and these settlements allow us to keep building toward that goal,” John Morgan and ​Emily Jeffcott, trial attorneys for plaintiff Kadence, said in a statement.

Child safety expert and a long-time Snap critic Sarah Gardner believes that Snap’s settlement of this case indicates the company was fearful of its internal documents revealing damning evidence. “Snap wanted to do everything in their power to settle this case,” said Gardner, co-founder of the nonprofit 

. “They know that if this case went to trial, the public would gain access to thousands of documents detailing how they knowingly addicted kids and justifying enormous levels of harm to millions of children across the globe.”

But this speaks to a much larger trend this year: social media addiction cases settling right before they go to trial or during trial.

 , agreeing to pay a minimum $100 million. A month prior, Meta agreed to 

 as part of its landmark settlement with 52 attorney generals from US states and more, where it had been accused of designing addictive platforms and profiting from exploiting the attention and time of children. An individual plaintiff bellwether trial that was scheduled for July did not make it to court after TikTok, YouTube and Snap settled with the plaintiff, who then 

Carolina Rossini, a law professor at University of Massachusetts, says she has “mixed feelings” about the growing wave of settlements. “They are certainly important for the parties involved, and they signal that companies are taking litigation risks seriously,” she told Tech Policy Press. “They may also increase pressure to settle the remaining bellwether cases, particularly as companies assess the financial and reputational costs of going to trial. But settlements are not admissions of liability, nor do they establish legal precedent.”

What’s the point of a bellwether trial?

Thousands of different kinds of social media addiction cases have been filed in recent years. Over 3,000 cases were 

 into a Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding or JCCP. Kadence and Shawna were part of this JCCP. Their trial was one among the many chosen as a “bellwether,” or a representative test case. The first bellwether trial from the JCCP was held in February in Los Angeles, which was also the first ever in the country to 

: when a 20-year-old woman who went by the initials K.G.M. won against Meta and Google after a jury found them liable. The companies were ordered to pay $6 million in damages. (Meta is appealing this verdict).

A second tranche of cases has been consolidated into a sprawling multi-district litigation, which also 

 over 3,000 cases with several different tracks under it. In addition, there are cases filed by individual states.

For the thousands of cases consolidated into JCCP or the MDL, the judges decided that they would pick “test” cases as representative or “bellwether” that would help determine the verdict for others as well.

“The point of the bellwether trials is to essentially answer two questions. One, are the plaintiffs' claims likely to succeed across the hundreds or thousands of other cases? And two, if so, how should each case be valued,” said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. “And with that information, the [other] parties would potentially have enough information to settle, because then at that point they can start to estimate what each case might be worth.”

But that’s not how the bellwethers have been going. “We have seen more of them settle than reach trial, and settlements of bellwether cases doesn't really answer any relevant question because the whole point was to do some statistical sampling, so if the litigants opt out of that sample, we still don't get the data that we need.”

Gregory Dickinson, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska, echoes similar concerns about the settlement nullifying the bellwether approach. “That takes something away from the bellwether process. Bellwethers exist to show what juries will do, and every settlement leaves both sides valuing the remaining cases with less information,” said Dickinson.

Experts say that one main reason why the companies have been settling their cases is because they don’t want to take any chances with the jury, given that the first trial that went to the jury reached a positive verdict for the plaintiff.

“I think the settlements show the companies are worried about how their arguments will play with juries. They have some decent defenses, especially on causation, because it's hard for a plaintiff to show that a specific feature caused her harm,” said Dickinson. “But that's a nuanced argument to make to a jury, and these companies aren't sympathetic defendants right now. So they're settling even cases they might win to avoid the risk of a massive verdict.”

A big concern that Rossini has with the spate of settlements is that they may “limit the larger policy conversation we desperately need to have about platform accountability.”

“While I understand why plaintiffs settle, and why these agreements may represent meaningful victories for families, I don’t think we should confuse a wave of settlements with systemic accountability or meaningful regulatory reform,” said Rossini. “In some ways, we risk privatizing the resolution of what are fundamentally public-interest questions.”

Ultimately, she adds, she would like to see these cases contribute to “a broader public conversation about the responsibilities of platforms, the incentives behind their design choices, and the need for transparency and independent oversight.” These confidential settlements, she worries, may close that door even before there’s a chance to learn enough about what is behind it.

As opposition to Silicon Valley’s infrastructure frenzy bloomed across the country over the past year, it became increasingly clear that AI and data centers would have some role to play in the midterm election cycle. We just had to wait and see exactly what the role would be.

In Texas, a state that saw some of the most stunning outcomes of the night, data centers featured prominently in Democratic candidates’ platforms all the way down the ballot.

Senator-elect James Talarico has called to end the state’s sales tax exemption for data centers — research from Good Jobs First calculates that the 

 on that tax break is approaching a projected $3.3 billion. Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa called on her opponent, outgoing Governor Greg Abbott, to 

 until the legislature can convene to pass restrictions.

The state’s incoming agriculture commissioner, the first Democrat to hold that seat 

 about wanting to support Texas communities fighting data center projects.

“People really understood—especially the rural counties understood—that the same people who are closing our schools, who are telling us we don’t have money, are also giving billions to data centers,” observed Matthew Rodriguez, co-founder of the Amanecer People’s Project in El Paso, Texas. “Data centers felt like kicking rural Texas while they were down.”

In Georgia, another epicenter of new data center construction, the power-hungry facilities’ impacts on utility bills became a flashpoint in special elections last year that saw Democrats flip two seats on the state’s five-person Public Service Commission, which has been Republican-controlled for the past thirty years.

On Tuesday, Democrats held onto those gains and flipped a third seat, 

 of the Commission for the first time since 1996.

Georgia Governor-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms has called to 

’s incoming governor, Hannah Pingree. With results still pending in 

, both states also look poised to welcome governors who have called for moratoriums until statewide regulations on data centers are passed.

Like many Congressional candidates who made data centers a central issue in their campaign, Michigan’s new Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed 

 voters’ concerns about these projects to the broader affordability crisis that was 

 for many voters as they went to the polls.

One of El-Sayed’s final campaign stops was in Ypsilanti Township, where residents have been 

 a controversial data center project being pushed by the University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Laboratory. El-Sayed 

 that he supported a local moratorium and would also like to see federal regulation of the industry.

Of course, it’s rare for statewide or national campaigns victories to hinge on a single issue. Voters across the country went to the polls with a 

 of groceries and gas to the Trump administration’s 

 being waged by ICE and cooperating law enforcement agencies across the country.

But in thirteen states, from Florida to Maine, data centers were put to a direct vote. And in almost every place that they were 

 of the state’s hotly contested Senate race between Sherrod Brown (D) and incumbent Jon Husted (R). People across the state voted on ballot measures prohibiting or severely restricting data center construction by establishing zoning regulations, challenging rezoning efforts and amending city charters.

In some places, the outcome was a rejection of an existing project – in others, it was preemptive, having seen what has happened to neighboring communities across Ohio and the broader Midwest. Conserve Ohio, a bipartisan grassroots movement to restrict hyperscale data center development in communities across the state, supported ten cities and villages in amending their charters to support hyperscale data center development.

Jessica Baker, one of Conserve Ohio’s co-founders, walked me through the list of Ohio ballot measures that passed by upwards of 70% of the vote: Sunbury, Pataskala, Urbana, Granville, Trenton, to name just a few. “I mean, these were not just barely wins,” Baker notes. “This sends a message to the state that the majority of the people do not want this.”

Industry’s biggest spending plays fell flat

This was also the first election cycle where a new cohort of pro-data center PACs made significant bets — with 

A network of organizations linked to Leading the Future — an AI-industry-aligned super PAC funded by major donors including Trump-allied venture capital shop Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale — 

 on races from South Carolina to Arizona. Build American AI, a Leading the Future affiliate, went big in Ohio. According to an 

 by DeSmog, the group bought “at least $2.54 million worth of television ads [that] extolled the economic benefits of Ohio’s data center boom.” Leading the Future offshoot American Mission contributed a reported $2 million to help Republican Darline Graham keep her Senate seat in South Carolina. Graham lost to Democratic challenger Annie Andrews in one of Tuesday’s highest profile contests; in September, Andrews 

 a two-year moratorium on data center construction.

Elon Musk spent close to half a billion dollars during this election cycle, with 

 targeting Texas races. Late Tuesday night, Musk posted: “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.”

“The right is fractured,” notes Rodriguez. “That is the clearest takeaway from Texas last night. The tech, the oil, and the Christian fundamentalist, right-wing monied forces are not working together well right now. And that led to a huge realignment.”

Tuesday’s results are not only a useful temperature check reflecting where voters stand. They set the stage for a new Congress, and reshaped state legislatures and regulatory agencies across the country.

It’s remarkable how much the political landscape has shifted in less than a year, due in no small part to the tech industry’s relentless appetite for expansion. Last November, moratoria on data center construction had barely entered the national political conversation.

Since then, opposition to the data center build-out has been 

 “the most bipartisan issue since beer.” On Tuesday, gubernatorial candidates flipped seats from Maine to Ohio while calling for a moratorium on data center construction. Opposition to data centers was a talking point in highly contested Senate races from Texas to Michigan, where long-shot challengers clinched decisive victories.

Leading tech companies have been on the defensive, with companies like Meta and OpenAI turning to 

 “charm” campaigns that some might describe as thinly veiled efforts to bribe communities into welcoming data centers. But an industry led by billionaires and trillionaires was already finding that, 

, their money simply won’t move the needle.

The specter of Congressional investigations now looms large, too. Late Tuesday night, Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) 

 to a comment about “televised trials of Big Tech executives” with a message promising subpoenas. In September, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, opened 

 use of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) to shield information about data center projects (days later, Amazon 

 it had stopped using NDAs in their deals). Raskin won his campaign for re-election on Tuesday by a margin as large as most data center ballot measures lost.

The road ahead is uncertain. Even as communities are successfully blocking data center proposals across the country — and, in many cases, replacing elected officials who supported those projects — the tech industry’s 

 are only growing. Meanwhile, other industries betting big on data centers — from fossil fuels to monopoly utilities — are increasingly 

 their considerable lobbying machines to the tech industry’s cause, both in state legislatures and in Congress.

Still, if AI industry boosters hope the anger voters brought with them to the polls this year is just a flash in the pan, they are in for a disappointment.

In Ohio, efforts to get a state-level data center moratorium on the ballot for the next election cycle are already underway. “We’re still taking cities,” notes Baker. “Any charter city that wants to do that, we can help.”

In Texas, Rodriguez says, Democrats have a real opportunity to build — if they’re willing to seize it. “What can the state government provide and set up the infrastructure for that gives people jobs and gives people a way to improve their air, and their water, and their schools that 

 a data center — that can show there is an alternative to what people hate already?”

This might have been the first national election cycle shaped by voters’ anger at not only data centers but also the political and economic realities that have enabled this hulking infrastructure to sprawl and lay claim to land, energy and water wherever Oracle or Microsoft or Amazon decide to set up shop next.

But unless voters see real changes — and soon — it won’t be the last.

” was more than a rebuke of United States President Donald Trump. Across the nation, voters made it clear that they 

, its vassals in the Trump administration and a MAGA-fied Republican party, as well as the sinister agenda they share and have been trying to impose by brute force for the past two years. Proponents of human rights, liberal democracy and the rule of law are right to celebrate.

But this isn’t the end of the technofascist plot against America. 

, this isn’t even the beginning of the end. However, it might be the end of the beginning.

Now that US voters have demonstrated opposition to the AI-driven immiseration and oppression agenda, we must turn our attention to accountability, reform, and renewal – and to the intra-left debates that will determine whether elected leaders will actually do the hard work, or merely pay lip service to it. The pro-democracy movement has drawn blood, but technofascism still lives. Here’s how to bury it.

 about “Americans wanting [Democrats] to get things done on their behalf” rather than “get even,” the new congressional majority must fulfill its constitutional duty to investigate suspected wrongdoing (including 

) by the executive branch and its private sector cronies, and begin collecting the evidence for eventual prosecutions. Louder for those in the back: accountability isn’t retribution. It’s the foundation of the rule of law.

At a federal level, it seems unlikely that Trump’s Department of Justice — which, at this stage, effectively operates as his personal law firm — will suddenly start acting in the public interest, but the evidence garnered through congressional investigations may nonetheless support state-level prosecutions, civil lawsuits, and generally sustain the momentum of public outrage into 2029, when voters will have the chance to vote for a new administration. Civil society must send a clear message to Democratic leadership: there is a difference between accountability and retribution. Investigations and oversight proceedings should be framed not as punishment, but as the necessary consequence for the technofascists’ attempt to overthrow American democracy.

Delivering that consequence will require prioritization, as the scale and scope of the administration’s wrongdoing threaten to overwhelm Congress’ already insufficient staff capacity. This will ultimately be a political decision, but it will be one on which public interest groups should weigh in to ensure that the tech industry’s role in implementing, bankrolling, and even motivating the Trump administration’s worst abuses is highlighted. And there is no shortage of such examples: 

. Office of Personnel Management director Russ Vought’s 

 of large language models to slash public spending. Federal contractor Palantir’s 

 of the Privacy Act to combine data from across the government to assist in ICE abductions. The introduction of ever more digital hoops for 

 to jump through to access the public benefits to which they are legally entitled. The list goes on.

Highlighting the role of the tech industry in these abuses serves two key purposes. First, consequences are a deterrent to further abuses. If all the broligarchs get is a slap on the wrist, there’s reason to fear they may double down on their efforts. And second, the public spectacle of oversight hearings is essential for building the political momentum for necessary reform under the next administration.

Absent a truly extraordinary set of events involving multiple successful impeachments and/or the 25th Amendment, the 120th Congress’s reform ambitions will be hamstrung by the White House until 2029. The next two years offer a precious window of opportunity for the non-fascist majority to vigorously debate and map out a reform agenda for the Third Reconstruction we desperately need — and to build the case for it with the public, so that the 48th President and 121st Congress (both taking office in January 2029) can hit the ground running.

In addition to structural reforms to civic institutions targeting voting rights, the two-party system, and the Supreme Court, the federal government must act to reign in the power of the tech industry, particularly the billionaires in thrall to 

. These reforms must be aimed at dismantling the sources of the industry’s power — wealth, data, market concentration, control over both mainstream and social media — and imposing meaningful corporate governance and accountability requirements. Specifically, that means amending the tax code to ensure that the wealthiest individuals and corporations pay their fair share; enacting comprehensive privacy legislation rooted in data minimization and purpose limitation; meaningfully address market concentration through antitrust enforcement and competition policy; and reversing the consolidation of media ownership that has been decades in the making.

As corporate accountability advocates know all too well, tech CEOs have successfully 

 dual-class share structures to keep their shareholders from holding them accountable, while OpenAI and Anthropic seem poised to use their status as 

 (PBCs), which allows them to consider their public-interest mission alongside their duty to prioritize shareholder dividends, in similar ways after their planned IPOs. The sustained 

 on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment practices have further eroded the notion that publicly-traded companies should be responsive to the public interest. Fortunately, there is already a rich literature and community of practice grounded in the 

UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights

, whose insights will be invaluable to the project of corporate governance reform.

If the American people are serious about permanently defeating technofascism, we must tackle the problem at its root: Silicon Valley’s extractive surveillance-based business models, market concentration, and the power structures that insulate its billionaire leaders from accountability. If this seems radical, that’s because it is: it targets root causes rather than symptoms to deliver the kind of big, structural change that this moment demands.

Building the future we all deserve — one in which all our basic needs are met, government at all levels operates in the public interest, and each of us is treated with dignity and respect — will require first dismantling the engines of structural oppression that stand in the way of progress. When Big Tech and the broligarchy are gone, entrepreneurs will finally have a chance to build new businesses whose success doesn’t rely on commodifying their users’ attention, monetizing their data, exploiting workers, enshittifying their own products, and degrading the natural environment. I can’t wait.

But, I also cannot stress this enough: we can’t just skip ahead to this part. We have to do the hard work of reform, and the hard work of politics, first. But then? Then, we could have nice things. Let’s get to work.

For every dollar an advertiser spends on a YouTube video, the platform keeps 45 cents. YouTube is not a neutral host that occasionally misses bad actors. It is a business partner in every monetized video, and it profits when those videos perform, including, new research suggests, ones that could break its own rules.

A new report from the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), “

,” puts a price on that partnership. GDI estimates that 100 English-language channels publishing what it classifies as hate speech are on track to earn about $13.3 million in ad revenue in 2026: $7.3 million for creators, $6 million for YouTube. One channel, earning an estimated $2.2 million a year, carried content that may breach YouTube’s Community Guidelines and German law. In September, it was still online, still showing ads and still viewable in Germany.

The report’s most revealing finding is not the size of these sums. It is how little anyone outside YouTube can know about them, and how conveniently that serves the company.

Six million dollars is a rounding error for a platform that 

 from ads and subscriptions in 2025 alone. The more plausible explanation for weak enforcement is not that hate is too lucrative to give up, but that enforcement costs time, staff and creator goodwill, while inaction costs little.

For creators, though, $2.2 million a year is a career. Recommendation systems tend to reward content that edges toward a platform’s policy line, and because YouTube shares the revenue, its interest in a high-performing video is aligned with the creator’s, not with the people that video targets.

GDI’s numbers deserve scrutiny. Five large language models labeled 19,297 videos; analysts manually reviewed 200. Its definition of hate speech follows the 

 and is broader than YouTube’s, so much of what it flagged is permitted on the platform. Critics will say GDI is counting lawful speech. But that gap is the point: YouTube’s narrow definitions decide what is monetizable, and only YouTube can test GDI’s estimates against real data.

YouTube’s repeat-offender clause applies in “rare cases” and never defines “repeatedly.” GDI found no evidence it had been used against the content it reviewed. A rule with an undefined trigger and unreported use is not really a rule. It is discretion. YouTube pledged to tighten its rules on monetizing hateful content after an 

. The pattern suggests enforcement tightens when revenue is threatened, then slackens when attention moves on.

What meaningful transparency would look like

YouTube’s transparency reports count removals, not videos that stay online but lose ads. Meaningful transparency would measure money, not takedowns. In practice, that means:

Enforcement data that matches the business model

 how many videos and channels are demonetized under the hate speech policy, by country of viewing.

A defined repeat-offender threshold, with annual figures on how often it is triggered. A rule YouTube must report on is a rule it must use.

 how much a video earned before demonetization, and how long it took. This shows whether enforcement removes the incentive or arrives after the money is made.

Video-level placement reports, so advertisers can see, and stop paying for, what their budgets fund.

Much of this sits within existing law. The 

 (DSA) requires platforms to explain any “restriction of monetary payments” to the affected user (

), and those explanations feed the Commission’s public 

. Regulators could check whether YouTube logs hate speech demonetizations there at all. The Commission can demand data on viewer location and revenue under 

 adopted in July 2025 lets vetted researchers request non-public platform data. In the UK, Category 1 transparency reports under the 

, due in 2027, give Ofcom a chance to require demonetization figures, not just removals.

, as GDI summarizes it, found trusted-flagger notices alleging illegal hate speech were not prioritized. Reporting can harden into box-ticking, and a demonetization figure means little without an independent sense of how much violating content exists. That is why researcher access matters as much as company reporting.

Following the money sidesteps the censorship fight

US-based creators account for 81% of the estimated revenue, an easy target in the transatlantic row over the DSA. But EU users were shown ads on sampled videos. If even 10% of views came from the EU, GDI estimates, that would mean $0.9 million in hate-linked ad revenue from January to August. This is only an estimate because YouTube alone knows where its viewers are.

Demonetization removes no video and silences no one. It asks a company to stop paying for, and profiting from, content that breaks its own rules or the law where it is viewed. That shifts the question from “what should come down” to “what should be paid for.” A platform that cannot answer it with data has already told regulators something.

A crowd of supporters surround President Lula holding a microphone at a podium draped with the Brazilian flag.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva delivers a victory speech after winning the presidential runoff in Brazil, Oct. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Lula’s Win Signals Fight to Regulate Social Media Will Escalate in Brazil

An illustrative photo of a man walking through the corridors of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

Behind the scenes - European Parliament in Strasbourg

Despite Spyware Attacks on Its Own Officials, EU Response Falls Short

A person holds a giant Brazilian flag while perched above a crowd of people at a rally on a large avenue, a few people are holding phones in the air. One person holds their hand in the air in the L shape, signifying support for Lula. 

Supporters of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at an election rally on Oct 11, 2026 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Rodilei Morais/Fotoarena/Sipa USA)

Meta Moderation Failures Loom Over Brazil’s Runoff Presidential Election

A voter leaves a polling station as voting continues in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on October 8, 2026 in London, England. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

UK Election Watchdog Develops AI System to Flag Deepfakes Within 3 Hours

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Tech Policy Press is tracking laws and regulations, along with government investigations and litigation, that will shape the rules and accountability for tech companies.

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