Something is shifting. In July, New York became the first state in the country to impose a moratorium on hyperscale data centers—the power-devouring facilities that fuel artificial intelligence—so that the state could actually study what they do to communities before letting them consume more of the grid. In March, juries in New Mexico and California found Meta liable for knowingly designing products that addict and exploit children, awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in damages with thousands of similar lawsuits waiting in the wings. In Tennessee, residents from Nashville to tiny Woodbury are packing commission meetings and passing local moratoriums, turning data center development into the kind of fight that turns neighbors into organizers and organizers into a political force.
It may feel, for the first time in a while, like Big Tech is finally being held accountable to the people whose lives its products affect. There is reason to be hopeful. But definitely don’t count them out.
I should know. I spent the better part of a decade in the middle of the last fight against these companies that seemed to be gaining momentum. I went into Mark Zuckerberg’s office. I refused to sign his NDA. I sat across from him with two of the most respected civil rights leaders in the country—Sherrilyn Ifill and Vanita Gupta—and watched him argue about mail-in voting with people who had spent their careers defending the right to vote—even when he, like Donald Trump, had voted absentee. I was in the room when he hid behind a young undocumented woman’s story to avoid changing the algorithmic amplification rules that were flooding his platform with disinformation. I helped lead the largest advertiser boycott in history against Facebook, one that cost Zuckerberg $7 billion in personal net worth. And after all of that, the civil rights audit we won, the boycott we organized, the pressure we built, Facebook in many ways got worse, not better. It amplified the hate speech and conspiracy theories that contributed to the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Then Zuckerberg bent the knee to Trump.
I am not telling you this to depress you. I am telling you because the momentum we are seeing right now in courtrooms, in statehouses, in community meetings where 150 people show up to say no new data centers, is real. It matters, and it will be wasted if we do not learn from what happened last time.
Here is what I learned.
They have a playbook, and it works
Big Tech corporations do not simply resist accountability. It goes further than that. They have systematized it. When Color Of Change and our coalition partners created enough pressure to get meetings with Facebook’s leadership, too often we were in a dialogue rather than a negotiation. We were in a dialogue that was designed to exhaust us. Zuckerberg was rehearsing arguments, testing what he could get away with saying to Congress, to regulators, to the press. He was running out the clock. What he wasn’t doing was trying to find solutions.
Along the way, they apologized insincerely, over and over, including to the faces of parents whose children had been harmed by their platforms. They lied about what they knew, even as internal documents later proved they understood the damage better than we did. They hired a Republican PR firm to circulate racist smears about Color Of Change, playing on the ugliest historical tropes to undermine our credibility. They tried to buy us off, offering $1.5 million through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative after years of refusing to fund us, with the clear expectation that we would shut up. We didn’t take it.
And when the pressure got serious, when the boycott hit and the stock price dropped, they conceded on a handful of changes while deploying the same tactics that every corporation in America have or will eventually borrow from. This is how these companies operate right now—and it is what the people winning these new fights should expect.
The real lesson is about political power
The most important thing I learned fighting Big Tech is this: lawmakers consistently believed there would be consequences for challenging these companies, but not for failing to do so. That calculation—more than any legal doctrine, more than any research report—is what has kept meaningful regulation off the table. Politicians on both sides received contributions, secured perks, and calculated that the safer bet was to leave Big Tech alone.
That is precisely what has to change. The data center fights are important, and they are creating the kind of local, material, tangible engagement that has long been missing from the abstract debate over tech regulation. When a resident of Nashville stands up at a planning commission meeting and says, “My generation needs you to put every roadblock in place to stop data centers,” that is someone connecting Big Tech’s power to the conditions of their own life. That is the raw material of political accountability.
But verdicts can be appealed. Local moratoriums can be overridden. What cannot be easily undone is a broad base of people who are willing to reward, pressure, and judge those in power based on whether they are willing to confront these companies. When we can make meaningful regulation of Big Tech a political litmus test—not just a policy discussion among advocates and experts but a political expectation from voters—then we have a path to accountability.
Beware of fake solutions
When the pressure mounts, these companies will offer concessions. One of the most important lessons from the last fight is the difference between real solutions and fake solutions. When social media platforms tell us that “digital literacy” is the answer to the harm their algorithms cause, which means placing the burden of safety on the user rather than on the corporation that designed the product to break through people’s defenses, that is a fake solution. When they promise self-regulation while retaining unchecked, unilateral control over every decision—as Zuckerberg does with Meta, as Musk does with X—that is a fake solution. Real solutions require independence: independent standards, independent oversight, independent enforcement by people who are accountable to the communities being harmed, not to the shareholders doing the harming.
The comparison to Big Tobacco is not rhetorical. These companies lie about the contents and effects of their products the same way tobacco companies lied about addiction and cancer. The difference is that we waited 40 years to regulate Big Tobacco. We cannot afford to do that again—not when these platforms are reprogramming our economy, our democracy, and our culture in real time.
The fights over data centers are an on-ramp
What excites me most about this moment is not the courtroom victories, important as they are. It is what is happening in communities, in Tennessee, in New York, in Virginia, and beyond, where people are connecting the physical infrastructure of Big Tech to the way it operates in their lives.
A data center is not an abstraction. It uses your water, it strains your grid. It raises your electricity bill. It sits next to your zoo, your neighborhood, your kid’s school. When people fight a data center, they are learning in concrete terms what it means to hold these corporations accountable. And that experience can build the energy necessary to make accountability a political expectation rather than simply a policy conversation.
But Big Tech will fight back. They will spend whatever it takes. They will find friendly legislators. They will offer communities deals that look generous and aren’t. They will try to divide coalitions. They will deploy the same playbook they used against us and they will innovate new versions of it. Apologies, lies, buyoffs, distraction.
So, we have to be ready. That means being honest about what works and what doesn’t—which means seeing clearly when we are in a dialogue that leads nowhere and when we have built enough leverage to force a real negotiation. It means building the kind of infrastructure that generates political power, not just public attention. It means creating constituencies of real people (not just policy experts and advocates) who will hold their elected officials accountable for whether they stand up to these companies or fold.
Big Tech remains on track to reprogram the operating system of this country. They are making our economy more precarious, our democracy more fragile, and our culture more subservient to their profits—without regard for what that does to the rest of us. We have the chance, right now, to change the trajectory. But only if we learn from the last fight—and only if we refuse the wishful thinking that will lead us to lose this one.