Comment on Censorship Tracker Banned Me for Tracking Its Censorship by dickie

Parent Post: Censorship Tracker Banned Me for Tracking Its Censorship

dickie · 7/24/2026, 10:57:04 PM (edited) · permalink

The Maine section is not merely incomplete. It presents a partial dataset as though it were a meaningful statewide count.

Censorship Tracker does **not publish a usable definition** of a data center.

It calls the facilities “large data centers,” but provides no threshold for:

- Electrical demand
- Square footage
- Server capacity
- Number of racks
- Hyperscale versus colocation
- Dedicated facilities versus enterprise server buildings
- Edge facilities
- Cryptocurrency facilities
- Separate buildings on one campus

Its facility information comes from the IM3 Data Center Atlas, which was derived from OpenStreetMap.

IM3 describes that inventory as crowd-sourced and explicitly warns that facilities may be missing. It also warns that a campus and its individual buildings can both appear, creating possible duplicate or overlapping records.

Its classifications are essentially mapped points, buildings and campuses, not a clearly defined class such as “facilities consuming at least 20 megawatts.”

So the practical definition appears to be:

&gt; **Whatever somebody entered into OpenStreetMap and the IM3 import recognized as a data center.**

Therefore, “Maine has two” does not mean Maine has only two data centers.

It means the particular upstream dataset produced two Maine records that Censorship Tracker displayed.

For comparison, the commercial directory DataCenterMap currently lists **11 Maine facilities in eight markets**.

That directory is not an official inventory either, but the difference between 2 and 11 demonstrates that the tracker is measuring dataset coverage, not the actual number of facilities in Maine.

FirstLight alone advertises facilities in places including Brunswick, Bangor and Portland, while other operators list Maine facilities elsewhere.

There is another methodology problem.

Censorship Tracker says its map includes operational, proposed, under-construction, canceled and withdrawn projects. But the cited IM3 version describes itself as an inventory of **existing** facilities published in June 2025.

The tracker does not adequately explain where its proposed-project information comes from or how those entries are verified.

The statewide LD 307 veto is important, but it is nowhere close to the whole Maine story.

Municipalities have been imposing their own temporary restrictions while developing zoning, energy, water, noise, environmental and tax rules.

By July 2026, local action included at least:

- **Bangor:** Adopted a 180-day data-center moratorium on April 13, 2026.
- **Sanford:** Unanimously adopted a 91-day emergency moratorium on May 19 in response to a proposed project involving roughly 1,000 acres near the Mousam River.
- **Westbrook:** Unanimously adopted a 180-day moratorium on June 1.
- **Brunswick:** Adopted a 180-day moratorium on June 1 covering new or expanded facilities with at least one megawatt of capacity.
- **Gorham:** Adopted a data-center moratorium on June 2.
- **Scarborough:** Adopted a 180-day moratorium on June 3 amid consideration of a proposed west-side facility.

Gray was preparing a draft moratorium for formal consideration, and Wells had drafted unusually broad restrictions while debating how small a facility should qualify as a data center.

Those local definitions also illustrate why the tracker needs to disclose its own rule.

LD 307 covered facilities demanding **20 megawatts or more**, while Brunswick used **one megawatt**.

Wells considered definitions based partly on physical area and acknowledged that a very low threshold could capture ordinary businesses with sizable server rooms.

The tracker also describes the Jay development as the planned facility whose exemption caused Gov. Janet Mills to veto LD 307.

That accurately describes the veto dispute.

But in June 2026, Sentinel Data Centers withdrew from the project, leaving it on hold with its future undetermined.

A current tracker should say that.

&gt; Censorship Tracker displays two Maine facilities from an incomplete crowd-sourced mapping dataset. It does not establish that Maine has only two data centers, does not disclose a consistent size threshold, and records only one statewide pushback event while omitting a substantial wave of municipal moratoriums.

For a project advertising verification, this is a basic category error.

It has confused **the number of records it imported** with **the number of facilities that exist**.

6 bumps

hyokkim · 7/25/2026, 2:04:13 AM · permalink

4 bumps

dickie · 7/25/2026, 6:20:38 AM · permalink

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