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Democrats gain hundreds of seats in historic victories – and party set to embark on aggressive legislative spree

The blue wave that swept Republicans out of power across the United States didn’t just strike Congress. In Tuesday’s midterm elections, Democrats gained hundreds of seats in state legislatures across the country, under-the-radar victories that may have major implications for life in America.

Though ballots are still being counted, the party’s success appear to be historic – Democrats haven’t won full control of government in Arizona in 60 years, in Pennsylvania since the 1990s, and Wisconsin since their wipeout in 2010. In Michigan and Minnesota, they regained trifectas they lost after the 2024 election, while in Texas, they will control the state house for the first time since 2002.

Voters in Nevada, Virginia, Missouri and Idaho passed or strengthened protections for women’s reproductive freedom

Reproductive rights were on the ballot on Tuesday night as voters weighed in on several abortion-related measures, delivering a largely successful night for reproductive rights advocates encompassed by a historic blue wave.

In Nevada, voters approved an amendment enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution, permanently protecting access to abortion through the second trimester after a second referendum on the measure.

With parts of region served by company in severe drought still, regulators give it six weeks to come up with action plan

Repeated failures by South West Water to tackle leaks are putting customers at higher risks of losing water supplies as parts of the region remain in severe drought, regulators have said.

In a warning to the privatised company that serves 1.8 million people across the south-west of England, the regulators said it had been failing to meet targets to reduce leaks and repair burst pipes for seven years.

Data centers were on the ballot this election, and they lost.

While results from the midterm elections are still coming in, as of November 4, 38 out of 39 restrictions on data centers had passed—from temporary moratoriums on new construction to full bans. And multiple candidates who made opposition to data centers a key part of their campaign also won.

Take the example of William Lawrence, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Michigan’s purple 7th Congressional District, which Trump narrowly won in 2024. Lawrence, a progressive community organizer and cofounder of the Sunrise Movement, was new to politics and faced a challenge running against the Trump-backed incumbent, Tom Barrett. In the primary, facing two establishment Democrats who had raised more money, Lawrence won in part because he vowed to fight data centers.

“He found an issue that connected with local residents across partisanship,” says Matt Grossman, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. Recent polls say that seven in 10 Americans don’t want data centers to be built in their communities, for reasons ranging from potential impacts on electric bills to noise and water use.

In his first ad, Lawrence stood at a farm and said, “Tech billionaires want to turn this field into a massive data center that’ll jack up our energy bills and ruin our home values.” After going to local planning meetings to watch data center developers pitch projects, he said that it was an “abuse of power” in communities that didn’t have the resources to fight back. He also called for other controls on technology, including a pause on development of advanced artificial intelligence and mandatory safety requirements for AI.  

Barrett, his Republican opponent, had supported data centers in the past. That included a vote for a version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would have stopped states’ ability to regulate AI, and likely also data centers, for a decade. (The provision was later taken out of the bill). The OBBBA includes tax breaks for companies building out AI infrastructure. Barrett also voted for the SPEED Act, which accelerates data center construction. As backlash to data centers grew, Barrett argued that communities should have local control over whether projects get built, but the message fell flat. Lawrence won.

Barrett was unpopular for other reasons—including the fact that he’d never held a local town hall—and it’s not clear that data centers were the thing that made voters push him out, versus anger about the Iran war, tariffs’ impact on the Michigan economy, and other factors. It’s probably too early to say that data centers as an issue swung a race, says Daniel Schiff, an associate professor of technology policy at Purdue University. But the election results affirm the opposition.

“If you had seen elections flip the other way, you would have said, oh, wow, this data center stuff actually isn’t that much of a concern for the public compared to other things,” Schiff says. That didn’t happen, and Democrats in other states who campaigned against data centers also won.

In Texas, Gina Hinojosa became first Democrat elected governor since 1990, beating the Republican incumbent Greg Abbott, after calling for a data center moratorium. (Abbott had called Texas the “epicenter of AI development,” before pivoting to pause new data centers; Hinojosa said she would go further.)

In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, also won a race for governor after campaigning for a statewide moratorium on data centers. In New Mexico, the Democrat Deb Haaland pledged to implement a statewide moratorium and won the governor’s race. In Ohio, the Democrat Amy Acton called for a conditional moratorium and beat Vivek Ramaswamy in the governor’s race. Multiple candidates for Congress won on anti-data center platforms, like Sherrod Brown, who won a Senate seat after calling his Republican opponent the “face of data centers” in Ohio.

Opposition to data centers arguably was part of the reason that other races were much closer than expected—like in a race in southeast Georgia, where residents have opposed a new OpenAI data center. Trump won the district by nearly 50 points in the last presidential election, but the Republican candidate for Congress this year won by fewer than 3 points.

The question now is what public sentiment about data centers actually means for the tech industry’s plans for AI. It’s not clear that opposition to data centers is as much about AI as it is about issues like electricity prices and the climate impacts of soaring energy use. Those impacts aren’t baked in; it is possible to build data centers that run on clean energy paid for by tech companies, for example. But the skepticism about data centers is now so ingrained that it’s likely more moratoriums will pass.

That could mean that data center developers end up flocking to the few places left that might not fight them. “They’ll say, OK, we need to do this more quietly . . . we need to go to the communities that don’t speak back,” Schiff says. “That would be a plausible and unfortunate consequence.”

Tech companies are already struggling to access power for data centers, and as data centers themselves keep getting harder to build, it could also meaningfully slow down the spread of AI. Anthropic’s IPO filing said that the backlash against data centers could limit its ability to grow.

The tech industry has spent billions betting that it can build AI infrastructure fast enough to stay ahead of demand. But the midterms suggest that it may not be able to build fast enough to stay ahead of public opposition.

“The harm in this matter is difficult to overstate,” wrote a New Mexico judge who ordered tech giant Meta to pay one of the largest data privacy case penalties in American history. The $25 billion fine came in a case about how Trump campaign firm Cambridge Analytica deceptively used data from Facebook users without their permission to create psychographic profiles to target voters in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

But the New Mexico penalty was for statements Facebook made that deceived users about data privacy and its response to Cambridge Analytica—not for the harm caused by how the harvested data was used. Those harms are alleged to include exploiting psychological vulnerabilities, targeting people’s fears and discouraging them from voting.

I’m a political communication scholar who studies propaganda, surveillance, and information warfare. My research helped expose the Cambridge Analytica scandal through U.K. newspaper The Guardian’s reporting on whistleblower accounts and the evidence I uncovered. That evidence was submitted to parliamentary and congressional investigations. I have followed the unfolding legal cases closely.

My takeaway from a decade of litigation is that Facebook has been penalized for misleading users and regulators about its data practices and its response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But I would contend that the company has largely escaped accountability for the underlying political exploitation of that data.

The failure to bring cases around harms may be partly due to earlier failures to fully investigate the data misuse.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election encompassed Cambridge Analytica. However, the committee stated in its final report that it “was unable to obtain the corporate communications of Cambridge Analytica or its parent company SCL Group, which had already been seized by U.K. authorities.”

The relevant U.K. authorities, the Information Commissioner’s Office, which governs data protection and took possession of Cambridge Analytica’s servers, told me in response to my 2021 Freedom of Information Act request that the Senate committee staff made initial inquiries to the office but appear not to have followed up with a formal request, “so no information sharing has taken place.” Without a formal request, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation lacked important data.

At the same time, the U.K. investigations of Cambridge Analytica’s use of personal data to manipulate voting behavior focused on the referendum of British voters over whether to leave the EU, not events in the U.S.

Facebook user data was at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

A 2020 documentary film I advised as a researcher, People You May Know, raised questions about Cambridge Analytica’s work with an app marketed to American churches, called Gloo, that used Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook data-derived psychographic profiling in their communities. Evidence in the New Mexico case reinvigorates these questions about the full extent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The judge in the case ruled Facebook knew that its own processes for investigating whether apps misused personal data were inadequate and that it could not enforce deletion of the data. The judge also concluded the company failed to notify users about thousands of applications associated with data misuse. Meta said it would appeal the decision.

Meta responded to a request for comment with the company’s official statement about the New Mexico ruling, arguing the case “seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.” Meta did not address the issue of its own role in the data privacy violations committed by Cambridge Analytica.

Meta is also trying to close the door on further claims before they are litigated.

In August 2026, on the eve of a child-safety trial in federal court in Oakland, California, Meta settled with a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general for roughly $17 billion. The agreement includes 47 states, the District of Columbia, and two U.S. territories. Folded into that deal was an allocation of $459.3 million to settle Cambridge Analytica-related claims held by participating states.

The participating attorneys general agreed, to the extent of their authority, to “fully, finally, and forever” release Meta from “any and all Claims, whether known or unknown, whether accrued or unaccrued.” By expressly encompassing “unknown” and “unaccrued” claims, the agreement reached beyond what investigators had already uncovered. Participating states accepted payment to give up claims arising from Meta’s conduct even if they did not yet know those claims existed.

A decade-old matter—Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal—was quietly brushed under the rug in an unrelated lawsuit about harm to teens.

From the 2019 Federal Trade Commission order to the 2022 class action settlement to August 2026’s multistate deal, settlements and releases have meant the company paid a relatively small price for its deception while not having the harms from the data exploitation adjudicated. Ultimately, the biggest privacy judgment in American history stands as a measure of the cover-up, not the alleged crime.

Other scholars and I regularly call attention to the lack of comprehensive U.S. privacy legislation, but there remain other legal pathways to pursue the harms Cambridge Analytica wrought. States like New Mexico can continue the fight, and Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who brought the case, promised, “We’re just getting started.”

Dissenting from the FTC’s 2019 settlement, then-Commissioner Rohit Chopra criticized the failure to consider “Facebook’s unjust enrichment.” He said “the company’s potential exposure is likely far greater” than the $5 billion imposed by the FTC settlement.

The question remains what exactly Facebook gained from enabling Cambridge Analytica’s abuses. Authorities could also investigate harmful data use for any other apps Facebook may have failed to fully assess, including any associated with Cambridge Analytica’s projects.

If the deception about Cambridge Analytica is worth $25 billion, I believe the public is entitled to know what the underlying harms to them are worth. New Mexico opted out of the 2026 multistate settlement and proved that a state willing to go to trial against Meta can win.

The next task, in my view, is to investigate fully and, where legal claims remain available, pursue accountability for harms resulting from the data exploitation. Otherwise, Cambridge Analytica will remain at the heart of the most consequential privacy scandal in American history, whose full harms have not been tested in court.

Emma L. Briant is a visiting associate professor at the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society at the University of Notre Dame.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Connie Collins, a 25-year-old sex educator, walked through the unlocked door of a stylish apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to find a man lying naked and face down on a bed. “I put on a strap and just started strapping away at him,” she says. “It was just super crazy. I’ve never done anything like that before.”

The pair didn’t know each other’s names, nor had they seen each other’s faces. Though they’d later develop a brief friendship, they had met only hours earlier, under pseudonyms, on an app named Pure, billed as “the open-minded dating app.”

Even as mainstream dating apps scramble to respond to dwindling subscribers and Gen Z skepticism, 12-year-old Pure—which presents itself as an alternative to traditional services like Hinge and Tinder, and as an even less inhibited version of kink-friendly Feeld—has been on a tear. In February, the company reported that it had reached $100 million in annual revenue. Pure tells Fast Company that it has now reached . . .

a $220 million run rate—and is forecasting to double that figure next year. Over the past year, Pure’s revenue has more than doubled in the U.S, its biggest market. 

The sex-forward dating app is free to download but men and nonbinary users must pay for a subscription ($13.99 a week, $648 a year) to initiate chats and maximize their visibility. Women have access to most features on the app for free, though the Pure Queens subscription (starting at $4.99 a week) gives them access to more controls. Pure says that its users are split 60-40 between men and women—and most are Gen Z and millennial. (Tinder, which appeals to the same demographic, has a ratio of roughly 75% male, 25% female.)

“People are getting a bit tired of all the traditional swipe-based dating apps and they’re looking for something different,” says Pure’s CEO, Luka Dremelj. He credits Pure’s success to its unique interface and user experience. Users on Pure don’t swipe through profiles, accepting and rejecting matches. Instead, they scroll through a feed of “personal ads” posted by other users, expressing interests, desires, or provocative come-ons. That feed is full of individuals who have identified similar turn-ons—everything from music and massage to one-night stands, foot fetishes, and dominant and submissive relationships. 

Though it facilitates in-person connections, Pure is just as much about chatting and sexting, allowing users to share explicit photos and videos, which disappear after viewing, and engage in video calls. As dating apps contend with Gen Z users who are either uninterested or too anxious to meet in person, Pure offers a different proposition: allowing them to explore their sexuality behind a screen, with limited human contact. 

The app’s unorthodox approach to privacy—all users are anonymous, even to the app itself, which doesn’t verify identity—is one of its biggest draws, reducing barriers to connections and letting people explore their turn-ons without inhibition. But, as a recent lawsuit in Texas indicates, it may leave some users exposed. 

Pure’s approachability starts with its design language, which is filled with bright colors and playful, hand-drawn illustrations after a redesign earlier this year. “We’re bringing this human touch to the user experience,” says Dremelj, who joined the company in 2022, shortly after RM Equity Partners, a European private equity firm, bought the app. “There’s a bit of humor in there.”

Users first experience this humor during the onboarding process. They begin by choosing their gender and sexuality on screens that feature whimsical drawings. Then they create their “ad,” which serves almost like an old-school newspaper personal, enticing people to click on their profile, which can be customized with photos and different background colors and designs. 

To make it easier for users to share their desires, Pure allows them to select from a list of more than 20 turn-ons to display on their profiles—each portrayed by illustrated icons. Those options include feminism (tagline: “let’s dismantle the patriarchy together”), outdoor hangs (“fresh air, dirty thoughts”), home video (illustrated by a clapperboard with “take 69” on it), and therapy (“mindful of my relationship with myself and others”). Others are kinkier and include edging, cuckolding, and wax play.

Users’ turn-ons are also displayed on their personal ads, which include a brief tagline stating what they’re looking for and optional photos. Users discover one another’s ads in a feed that Pure can adjust. “Sometimes, instead of leading with photos, we will put someone’s turn-ons as the first thing users might read about them in the feed,” Dremelj says. When two users express the same desires, the app might inform them that they have mutual turn-ons to give them a conversation starter. 

Crucially, users can always go back and look at profiles they may have initially passed on. There’s no such thing as a “hard pass” in the open world of Pure. 

While Pure’s visual design sets it apart from other apps, its approach to privacy shapes virtually every interaction. An app designed for casual encounters and sexting has to walk a thin line between offering users anonymity while keeping them safe. 

To start, every user is assigned a random username, though they can use their real name if they choose. They’re not required to share any pictures or answer any prompts about themselves. 

Most dating and hook-up apps take an à la carte approach to privacy. A user might fill in their profile, then toggle over to settings to make sure that location services, or features that detect mutual friends, are turned off. By contrast, Pure’s settings default to anonymity. “The traditional discourse around sharing information on dating apps is that we have to make the online world smaller, more controlled, and less anonymous,” says Sergej Vujanović, Pure’s chief product officer. “I feel that some level of anonymity at the start is great, and then you can decide on your terms when you want to share. We’re not prohibiting sharing more.”

Dilara Doshi, a Berlin-based, 31-year-old content creator, joined Pure two years ago to explore her sexuality. She says that she usually meets up with someone within hours of beginning a chat on the app. “I display pictures of my face. I have a picture in a bikini, so you can see my body shape,” she says. “I use my real name and my real age. Some other users actually hide their faces on their profiles with a cap, or put an emoji on top, or sunglasses, or they write, ‘Hey, if it’s a vibe, I can send you pictures of me.’”

All content from Pure chats disappears after 24 hours, though both users can agree to remove the time limit. Photos and videos also disappear after 24 hours, and can be opened only once. 

“Sometimes people ask to move the conversation to WhatsApp, but I don’t usually say yes to that because it’s sexting,” Doshi says. “I like that our communication disappears on Pure. I don’t want footage being saved.” (Grindr provides some comparable safeguards, including self-destructing imagery alongside settings that allow members to obscure their physical distance and opt out of appearing in local discovery feeds.)

Screenshots are also banned on Pure, and if a user tries to take one, the other party is notified. When she started using the app, Collins attempted to take a screenshot of a conversation to send to her friends. When the app informed the person she was chatting with, Collins was embarrassed but also relieved: “Knowing that I, a well-intentioned person, tried to screenshot a conversation and couldn’t, made me feel really safe.”

Someone could still use a separate device to photograph whatever is on the phone, as Aaron Rose, a cybersecurity expert at Check Point Software Technologies, points out. He also notes, “Without identity verification, you don’t necessarily know offhand that who you’re talking to is an actual human being. It could be a bot.” 

Pure encourages users to keep all their interactions within the app until they meet up in person. “When you get into a chat with somebody, if you share a social handle with them, we’ll send you a notification asking, Hey, are you sure you want to share that? Because then the other party can usually identify you,” says Vujanović, the chief product officer.

Before meeting up with another user, Collins will often video chat with them within the app to make sure they’re representing themselves accurately. “I did it with somebody recently,” she says. “We got to have a preliminary conversation about what we would want if we were together.”

Doshi uses the app on trips from Germany to her native Turkey, where many users are anonymous to protect themselves. But anonymity can be a double-edged sword. “Because I talk openly about sex, sometimes I have hateful comments from Turkish men on social media and on the app,” she says. “When I see a Turkish man matching me and he wants to meet me, I’m like maybe he’s very conservative, and maybe it’s just a trap. Sometimes gay men or young women get catfished on [dating and relationship platforms], and then something happens to them.”

Pure doesn’t require photo or video verification for users nor does it have an age verification process, except in regions where local laws mandate such proof, like the U.K. “We believe the best thing would be that the verification process would be done already at the level of Apple and Google in their app stores,” Vujanović says. “The app is built around privacy, so when you ask users to upload their ID, they’re sometimes feeling a bit reluctant.” 

This approach sets it apart from Tinder, which introduced Face Check for all new users in every territory last year. The tool doesn’t ask for a government ID, but does compel all new users to go through a video selfie verification process. Match Group, Tinder’s owner, told Congressional investigators that pilots of the tool reduced user interactions with scam accounts by 70% in the U.S.

Pure offers a similar feature, but it’s not required for users. Once a user is approved, a verification badge is displayed on their profile. Pure also has a feature called True Photos, which verifies photos taken in the app at a particular moment. Users can request a True Photo from someone while chatting; a photo will then appear with a verification checkmark proving that it was taken recently within the app. A feature called Safety Signal also lets a user share their last known location and their date’s Pure profile photos with a trusted person through a password-protected link.

Still, the lack of identity and age verification introduces risks, and makes it difficult for the app to police bad actors. A lawsuit filed in Harris County, Texas, in October alleges that, in March, a 35-year-old former police officer posed as a 16-year-old on Pure, where he connected with and arranged to meet a 13-year-old. The suit says he brought her to his home, gave her drugs, and sexually assaulted her. 

The company says it has yet to be contacted by U.S. law enforcement and learned of the incident through an article in the Houston Chronicle. “We are waiting for either law enforcement or the lawyers of the plaintiff to get back to us and tell us the details so that we can actually just check what happened,” Vujanović says. Pure adds that until it hears more, it can’t verify that either individual was ever on the app.

I joined Pure while reporting this article, uploading three pictures of myself, including my reporter headshot. I also clearly designated in my bio that I was a journalist looking to learn more about the app. 

Within an hour, I had more than 500 likes. When I matched with other users to ask them questions, I was often greeted with an ephemeral picture. I made the mistake of opening a few; they were all dick pics.

My experience is common for many women on the app. Doshi tells me that sometimes the volume of interest on the app can be overwhelming. Upon joining, she received 900 likes in a day, compared to 40 on Hinge. 

Collins says that the app has been validating for her as a queer woman of color. “I’ve never had these many matches before in my life. It felt like I was being shown to any and everyone, and my profile didn’t feel so thrown at the bottom of the pile,” she says.

She pays for a Pure Queens subscription, which she considers worthwhile for customizable filters that let her set her match radius and age range. She dislikes some subscriber perks other users pay extra for, like the one that gives them direct access to her inbox without matching with her first. She values the block feature.

Vujanović says that the app has tested AI-driven features that help users choose appealing pictures and help them fill out their bio (features available on Match Group apps and Bumble). The initiatives were nixed when they didn’t increase user interactions or connections. What does help with connections on Pure: when people use their anonymity to frankly describe their turn-ons in hope that someone will share them. 

Sometimes they strike out. When a user messaged me asking if I enjoyed the idea of multiple male partners peeing on me, I responded no. I added that I wasn’t on the platform to discuss such things.

But perhaps someone else was out there. “People have very, very, very specific kinks,” Doshi notes. “I hope they get lucky on Pure because I imagine it’s hard to find people who share them.” One thing she is clear on: “I don’t think AI can help so much.”

Borrowers will be taxed on student debt canceled under the program in 2026 and could owe up to $12,000 more in April, per a new analysis.

Data centers were on the ballot this election, and they lost.

While results from the midterm elections are still coming in, as of November 4, 38 out of 39 restrictions on data centers had passed—from temporary moratoriums on new construction to full bans. And multiple candidates who made opposition to data centers a key part of their campaign also won.

Take the example of William Lawrence, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Michigan’s purple 7th Congressional District, which Trump narrowly won in 2024. Lawrence, a progressive community organizer and cofounder of the Sunrise Movement, was new to politics and faced a challenge running against the Trump-backed incumbent, Tom Barrett. In the primary, facing two establishment Democrats who had raised more money, Lawrence won in part because he vowed to fight data centers.

“He found an issue that connected with local residents across partisanship,” says Matt Grossman, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. Recent polls say that seven in 10 Americans don’t want data centers to be built in their communities, for reasons ranging from potential impacts on electric bills to noise and water use.

In his first ad, Lawrence stood at a farm and said, “Tech billionaires want to turn this field into a massive data center that’ll jack up our energy bills and ruin our home values.” After going to local planning meetings to watch data center developers pitch projects, he said that it was an “abuse of power” in communities that didn’t have the resources to fight back. He also called for other controls on technology, including a pause on development of advanced artificial intelligence and mandatory safety requirements for AI.  

Barrett, his Republican opponent, had supported data centers in the past. That included a vote for a version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would have stopped states’ ability to regulate AI, and likely also data centers, for a decade. (The provision was later taken out of the bill). The OBBBA includes tax breaks for companies building out AI infrastructure. Barrett also voted for the SPEED Act, which accelerates data center construction. As backlash to data centers grew, Barrett argued that communities should have local control over whether projects get built, but the message fell flat. Lawrence won.

Barrett was unpopular for other reasons—including the fact that he’d never held a local town hall—and it’s not clear that data centers were the thing that made voters push him out, versus anger about the Iran war, tariffs’ impact on the Michigan economy, and other factors. It’s probably too early to say that data centers as an issue swung a race, says Daniel Schiff, an associate professor of technology policy at Purdue University. But the election results affirm the opposition.

“If you had seen elections flip the other way, you would have said, oh, wow, this data center stuff actually isn’t that much of a concern for the public compared to other things,” Schiff says. That didn’t happen, and Democrats in other states who campaigned against data centers also won.

In Texas, Gina Hinojosa became first Democrat elected governor since 1990, beating the Republican incumbent Greg Abbott, after calling for a data center moratorium. (Abbott had called Texas the “epicenter of AI development,” before pivoting to pause new data centers; Hinojosa said she would go further.)

In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, also won a race for governor after campaigning for a statewide moratorium on data centers. In New Mexico, the Democrat Deb Haaland pledged to implement a statewide moratorium and won the governor’s race. In Ohio, the Democrat Amy Acton called for a conditional moratorium and beat Vivek Ramaswamy in the governor’s race. Multiple candidates for Congress won on anti-data center platforms, like Sherrod Brown, who won a Senate seat after calling his Republican opponent the “face of data centers” in Ohio.

Opposition to data centers arguably was part of the reason that other races were much closer than expected—like in a race in southeast Georgia, where residents have opposed a new OpenAI data center. Trump won the district by nearly 50 points in the last presidential election, but the Republican candidate for Congress this year won by fewer than 3 points.

The question now is what public sentiment about data centers actually means for the tech industry’s plans for AI. It’s not clear that opposition to data centers is as much about AI as it is about issues like electricity prices and the climate impacts of soaring energy use. Those impacts aren’t baked in; it is possible to build data centers that run on clean energy paid for by tech companies, for example. But the skepticism about data centers is now so ingrained that it’s likely more moratoriums will pass.

That could mean that data center developers end up flocking to the few places left that might not fight them. “They’ll say, OK, we need to do this more quietly . . . we need to go to the communities that don’t speak back,” Schiff says. “That would be a plausible and unfortunate consequence.”

Tech companies are already struggling to access power for data centers, and as data centers themselves keep getting harder to build, it could also meaningfully slow down the spread of AI. Anthropic’s IPO filing said that the backlash against data centers could limit its ability to grow.

The tech industry has spent billions betting that it can build AI infrastructure fast enough to stay ahead of demand. But the midterms suggest that it may not be able to build fast enough to stay ahead of public opposition.

“The harm in this matter is difficult to overstate,” wrote a New Mexico judge who ordered tech giant Meta to pay one of the largest data privacy case penalties in American history. The $25 billion fine came in a case about how Trump campaign firm Cambridge Analytica deceptively used data from Facebook users without their permission to create psychographic profiles to target voters in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

But the New Mexico penalty was for statements Facebook made that deceived users about data privacy and its response to Cambridge Analytica—not for the harm caused by how the harvested data was used. Those harms are alleged to include exploiting psychological vulnerabilities, targeting people’s fears and discouraging them from voting.

I’m a political communication scholar who studies propaganda, surveillance, and information warfare. My research helped expose the Cambridge Analytica scandal through U.K. newspaper The Guardian’s reporting on whistleblower accounts and the evidence I uncovered. That evidence was submitted to parliamentary and congressional investigations. I have followed the unfolding legal cases closely.

My takeaway from a decade of litigation is that Facebook has been penalized for misleading users and regulators about its data practices and its response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But I would contend that the company has largely escaped accountability for the underlying political exploitation of that data.

The failure to bring cases around harms may be partly due to earlier failures to fully investigate the data misuse.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election encompassed Cambridge Analytica. However, the committee stated in its final report that it “was unable to obtain the corporate communications of Cambridge Analytica or its parent company SCL Group, which had already been seized by U.K. authorities.”

The relevant U.K. authorities, the Information Commissioner’s Office, which governs data protection and took possession of Cambridge Analytica’s servers, told me in response to my 2021 Freedom of Information Act request that the Senate committee staff made initial inquiries to the office but appear not to have followed up with a formal request, “so no information sharing has taken place.” Without a formal request, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation lacked important data.

At the same time, the U.K. investigations of Cambridge Analytica’s use of personal data to manipulate voting behavior focused on the referendum of British voters over whether to leave the EU, not events in the U.S.

Facebook user data was at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

A 2020 documentary film I advised as a researcher, People You May Know, raised questions about Cambridge Analytica’s work with an app marketed to American churches, called Gloo, that used Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook data-derived psychographic profiling in their communities. Evidence in the New Mexico case reinvigorates these questions about the full extent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The judge in the case ruled Facebook knew that its own processes for investigating whether apps misused personal data were inadequate and that it could not enforce deletion of the data. The judge also concluded the company failed to notify users about thousands of applications associated with data misuse. Meta said it would appeal the decision.

Meta responded to a request for comment with the company’s official statement about the New Mexico ruling, arguing the case “seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.” Meta did not address the issue of its own role in the data privacy violations committed by Cambridge Analytica.

Meta is also trying to close the door on further claims before they are litigated.

In August 2026, on the eve of a child-safety trial in federal court in Oakland, California, Meta settled with a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general for roughly $17 billion. The agreement includes 47 states, the District of Columbia, and two U.S. territories. Folded into that deal was an allocation of $459.3 million to settle Cambridge Analytica-related claims held by participating states.

The participating attorneys general agreed, to the extent of their authority, to “fully, finally, and forever” release Meta from “any and all Claims, whether known or unknown, whether accrued or unaccrued.” By expressly encompassing “unknown” and “unaccrued” claims, the agreement reached beyond what investigators had already uncovered. Participating states accepted payment to give up claims arising from Meta’s conduct even if they did not yet know those claims existed.

A decade-old matter—Facebook’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal—was quietly brushed under the rug in an unrelated lawsuit about harm to teens.

From the 2019 Federal Trade Commission order to the 2022 class action settlement to August 2026’s multistate deal, settlements and releases have meant the company paid a relatively small price for its deception while not having the harms from the data exploitation adjudicated. Ultimately, the biggest privacy judgment in American history stands as a measure of the cover-up, not the alleged crime.

Other scholars and I regularly call attention to the lack of comprehensive U.S. privacy legislation, but there remain other legal pathways to pursue the harms Cambridge Analytica wrought. States like New Mexico can continue the fight, and Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who brought the case, promised, “We’re just getting started.”

Dissenting from the FTC’s 2019 settlement, then-Commissioner Rohit Chopra criticized the failure to consider “Facebook’s unjust enrichment.” He said “the company’s potential exposure is likely far greater” than the $5 billion imposed by the FTC settlement.

The question remains what exactly Facebook gained from enabling Cambridge Analytica’s abuses. Authorities could also investigate harmful data use for any other apps Facebook may have failed to fully assess, including any associated with Cambridge Analytica’s projects.

If the deception about Cambridge Analytica is worth $25 billion, I believe the public is entitled to know what the underlying harms to them are worth. New Mexico opted out of the 2026 multistate settlement and proved that a state willing to go to trial against Meta can win.

The next task, in my view, is to investigate fully and, where legal claims remain available, pursue accountability for harms resulting from the data exploitation. Otherwise, Cambridge Analytica will remain at the heart of the most consequential privacy scandal in American history, whose full harms have not been tested in court.

Emma L. Briant is a visiting associate professor at the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society at the University of Notre Dame.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Connie Collins, a 25-year-old sex educator, walked through the unlocked door of a stylish apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to find a man lying naked and face down on a bed. “I put on a strap and just started strapping away at him,” she says. “It was just super crazy. I’ve never done anything like that before.”

The pair didn’t know each other’s names, nor had they seen each other’s faces. Though they’d later develop a brief friendship, they had met only hours earlier, under pseudonyms, on an app named Pure, billed as “the open-minded dating app.”

Even as mainstream dating apps scramble to respond to dwindling subscribers and Gen Z skepticism, 12-year-old Pure—which presents itself as an alternative to traditional services like Hinge and Tinder, and as an even less inhibited version of kink-friendly Feeld—has been on a tear. In February, the company reported that it had reached $100 million in annual revenue.

Pure tells Fast Company that it has now reached a $220 million run rate—and is forecasting to double that figure next year. Over the past year, Pure’s revenue has more than doubled in the U.S, its biggest market. 

The sex-forward dating app is free to download but men and nonbinary users must pay for a subscription ($13.99 a week, $99.99 a year) to initiate chats and maximize their visibility. Women have access to most features on the app for free, though the Pure Queens subscription (starting at $4.99 a week) gives them access to more controls. Pure says that its users are split 60-40 between men and women—and most are Gen Z and millennial. (Tinder, which appeals to the same demographic, has a ratio of roughly 75% male, 25% female.)

“People are getting a bit tired of all the traditional swipe-based dating apps and they’re looking for something different,” says Pure’s CEO, Luka Dremelj.

He credits Pure’s success to its unique interface and user experience. Users on Pure don’t swipe through profiles, accepting and rejecting matches. Instead, they scroll through a feed of “personal ads” posted by other users, expressing interests, desires, or provocative come-ons. That feed is full of individuals who have identified similar turn-ons—everything from music and massage to one-night stands, foot fetishes, and dominant and submissive relationships. 

Though it facilitates in-person connections, Pure is just as much about chatting and sexting, allowing users to share explicit photos and videos, which disappear after viewing, and engage in video calls. As dating apps contend with Gen Z users who are either uninterested or too anxious to meet in person, Pure offers a different proposition: allowing them to explore their sexuality behind a screen, with limited human contact. 

The app’s unorthodox approach to privacy—all users are anonymous, even to the app itself, which doesn’t verify identity—is one of its biggest draws, reducing barriers to connections and letting people explore their turn-ons without inhibition. But, as a recent lawsuit in Texas indicates, it may leave some users exposed. 

Pure’s approachability starts with its design language, which is filled with bright colors and playful, hand-drawn illustrations after a redesign earlier this year. “We’re bringing this human touch to the user experience,” says Dremelj, who joined the company in 2022, shortly after RM Equity Partners, a European private equity firm, bought the app. “There’s a bit of humor in there.”

Users first experience this humor during the onboarding process. They begin by choosing their gender and sexuality on screens that feature whimsical drawings. Then they create their “ad,” which serves almost like an old-school newspaper personal, enticing people to click on their profile, which can be customized with photos and different background colors and designs. 

To make it easier for users to share their desires, Pure allows them to select from a list of more than 20 turn-ons to display on their profiles—each portrayed by illustrated icons. Those options include feminism (tagline: “let’s dismantle the patriarchy together”), outdoor hangs (“fresh air, dirty thoughts”), home video (illustrated by a clapperboard with “take 69” on it), and therapy (“mindful of my relationship with myself and others”). Others are kinkier and include edging, cuckolding, and wax play.

Users’ turn-ons are also displayed on their personal ads, which include a brief tagline stating what they’re looking for and optional photos. Users discover one another’s ads in a feed that Pure can adjust. “Sometimes, instead of leading with photos, we will put someone’s turn-ons as the first thing users might read about them in the feed,” Dremelj says. When two users express the same desires, the app might inform them that they have mutual turn-ons to give them a conversation starter. 

Crucially, users can always go back and look at profiles they may have initially passed on. There’s no such thing as a “hard pass” in the open world of Pure. 

While Pure’s visual design sets it apart from other apps, its approach to privacy shapes virtually every interaction. An app designed for casual encounters and sexting has to walk a thin line between offering users anonymity while keeping them safe. 

To start, every user is assigned a random username, though they can use their real name if they choose. They’re not required to share any pictures or answer any prompts about themselves. 

Most dating and hook-up apps take an à la carte approach to privacy. A user might fill in their profile, then toggle over to settings to make sure that location services, or features that detect mutual friends, are turned off. By contrast, Pure’s settings default to anonymity. “The traditional discourse around sharing information on dating apps is that we have to make the online world smaller, more controlled, and less anonymous,” says Sergej Vujanović, Pure’s chief product officer. “I feel that some level of anonymity at the start is great, and then you can decide on your terms when you want to share. We’re not prohibiting sharing more.”

Dilara Doshi, a Berlin-based, 31-year-old content creator, joined Pure two years ago to explore her sexuality. She says that she usually meets up with someone within hours of beginning a chat on the app. “I display pictures of my face. I have a picture in a bikini, so you can see my body shape,” she says. “I use my real name and my real age. Some other users actually hide their faces on their profiles with a cap, or put an emoji on top, or sunglasses, or they write, ‘Hey, if it’s a vibe, I can send you pictures of me.’”

All content from Pure chats disappears after 24 hours, though both users can agree to remove the time limit. Photos and videos also disappear after 24 hours, and can be opened only once. 

“Sometimes people ask to move the conversation to WhatsApp, but I don’t usually say yes to that because it’s sexting,” Doshi says. “I like that our communication disappears on Pure. I don’t want footage being saved.” (Grindr provides some comparable safeguards, including self-destructing imagery alongside settings that allow members to obscure their physical distance and opt out of appearing in local discovery feeds.)

Screenshots are also banned on Pure, and if a user tries to take one, the other party is notified. When she started using the app, Collins attempted to take a screenshot of a conversation to send to her friends. When the app informed the person she was chatting with, Collins was embarrassed but also relieved: “Knowing that I, a well-intentioned person, tried to screenshot a conversation and couldn’t, made me feel really safe.”

Someone could still use a separate device to photograph whatever is on the phone, as Aaron Rose, a cybersecurity expert at Check Point Software Technologies, points out. He also notes, “Without identity verification, you don’t necessarily know offhand that who you’re talking to is an actual human being. It could be a bot.” 

Pure encourages users to keep all their interactions within the app until they meet up in person. “When you get into a chat with somebody, if you share a social handle with them, we’ll send you a notification asking, Hey, are you sure you want to share that? Because then the other party can usually identify you,” says Vujanović, the chief product officer.

Before meeting up with another user, Collins will often video chat with them within the app to make sure they’re representing themselves accurately. “I did it with somebody recently,” she says. “We got to have a preliminary conversation about what we would want if we were together.”

Doshi uses the app on trips from Germany to her native Turkey, where many users are anonymous to protect themselves. But anonymity can be a double-edged sword. “Because I talk openly about sex, sometimes I have hateful comments from Turkish men on social media and on the app,” she says. “When I see a Turkish man matching me and he wants to meet me, I’m like maybe he’s very conservative, and maybe it’s just a trap. Sometimes gay men or young women get catfished on [dating and relationship platforms], and then something happens to them.”

Pure doesn’t require photo or video verification for users nor does it have an age verification process, except in regions where local laws mandate such proof, like the U.K. “We believe the best thing would be that the verification process would be done already at the level of Apple and Google in their app stores,” Vujanović says. “The app is built around privacy, so when you ask users to upload their ID, they’re sometimes feeling a bit reluctant.” 

This approach sets it apart from Tinder, which introduced Face Check for all new users in every territory last year. The tool doesn’t ask for a government ID, but does compel all new users to go through a video selfie verification process. Match Group, Tinder’s owner, told Congressional investigators that pilots of the tool reduced user interactions with scam accounts by 70% in the U.S.

Pure offers a similar feature, but it’s not required for users. Once a user is approved, a verification badge is displayed on their profile. Pure also has a feature called True Photos, which verifies photos taken in the app at a particular moment. Users can request a True Photo from someone while chatting; a photo will then appear with a verification checkmark proving that it was taken recently within the app. A feature called Safety Signal also lets a user share their last known location and their date’s Pure profile photos with a trusted person through a password-protected link.

Still, the lack of identity and age verification introduces risks, and makes it difficult for the app to police bad actors. A lawsuit filed in Harris County, Texas, in October alleges that, in March, a 35-year-old former police officer posed as a 16-year-old on Pure, where he connected with and arranged to meet a 13-year-old. The suit says he brought her to his home, gave her drugs, and sexually assaulted her. 

The company says it has yet to be contacted by U.S. law enforcement and learned of the incident through an article in the Houston Chronicle. “We are waiting for either law enforcement or the lawyers of the plaintiff to get back to us and tell us the details so that we can actually just check what happened,” Vujanović says. Pure adds that until it hears more, it can’t verify that either individual was ever on the app.

I joined Pure while reporting this article, uploading three pictures of myself, including my reporter headshot. I also clearly designated in my bio that I was a journalist looking to learn more about the app. 

Within an hour, I had more than 500 likes. When I matched with other users to ask them questions, I was often greeted with an ephemeral picture. I made the mistake of opening a few; they were all dick pics.

My experience is common for many women on the app. Doshi tells me that sometimes the volume of interest on the app can be overwhelming. Upon joining, she received 900 likes in a day, compared to 40 on Hinge. 

Collins says that the app has been validating for her as a queer woman of color. “I’ve never had these many matches before in my life. It felt like I was being shown to any and everyone, and my profile didn’t feel so thrown at the bottom of the pile,” she says.

She pays for a Pure Queens subscription, which she considers worthwhile for customizable filters that let her set her match radius and age range. She dislikes some subscriber perks other users pay extra for, like the one that gives them direct access to her inbox without matching with her first. She values the block feature.

Vujanović says that the app has tested AI-driven features that help users choose appealing pictures and help them fill out their bio (features available on Match Group apps and Bumble). The initiatives were nixed when they didn’t increase user interactions or connections. What does help with connections on Pure: when people use their anonymity to frankly describe their turn-ons in hope that someone will share them. 

Sometimes they strike out. When a user messaged me asking if I enjoyed the idea of multiple male partners peeing on me, I responded no. I added that I wasn’t on the platform to discuss such things.

But perhaps someone else was out there. “People have very, very, very specific kinks,” Doshi notes. “I hope they get lucky on Pure because I imagine it’s hard to find people who share them.” One thing she is clear on: “I don’t think AI can help so much.”