by David Mendez

Running for the Washington State Legislature is a leap of faith for Danica Noble.

“I quit my federal job on February 9 and filed on February 10 for office,” Noble told The Osprey. “I’m running for office because I feel like I have to be willing to do the work that I know has to be done.”

For nearly 20 years, Noble worked as an antitrust and consumer protection attorney with the Federal Trade Commission, and spent the last five years of her career as part of the FTC’s lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, which argued that the tech giant assembled a monopoly with its purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram. (A federal court ruled in favor of Meta in November 2025; the FTC filed an appeal to the ruling in January. The case is ongoing.)

“My part of the case was online harms, and specifically online harms for children,” Noble said. The experience was especially difficult for her as a mother to three children growing up in an always-online world.

“I would never say that social media is free, because you pay with your attention or pay with your data,” Noble said. Services like Facebook, Google’s Gmail and other ostensibly free services are business models making money by selling ads based on user data and, especially, engagement metrics.

“You've got these manipulative design techniques that are being used to keep people engaged, to get those same metrics that drive profitability — or at least at this point, valuations for these companies,” Noble said. “But the manipulative design techniques are especially risky when used, I think, by developing minds.”

Noble’s campaign is distinguished by its focus on responsible technology, especially in seeking to prevent harm against children.

She began advocating for students when her son, like so many kids, fell behind in school during the height of COVID shutdowns. When she found it difficult to gain meetings with her representatives to discuss state education funding, she began organizing and training parents in civic engagement — and last year, she helped bring hundreds of families to Olympia for an education advocacy rally.

“You don't need any special skills. These people work for you, and if you can tell them what's important to you, you're helping them do their job,” Noble said.

Danica Noble grew up in Utah, and got her undergrad degree at Whitman College. Before going to and graduating from Georgetown Law School, she worked on indigenous land use rights in Hawai’i, then landed at the Federal Trade Commission, where she “fell in love” with antitrust law.

“Democracy is built with power to the people. And one of the things that corrupts that power to the people is the concentration of power and wealth,” Noble said. Anti-trust laws gained favor in the late 1890s, as the government sought to stop businesses from unfairly destroying competition, such as John D. Rockefeller’s dominant Standard Oil Co.

“It was meant to remake and un-concentrate economies. But now we have a very similar re-concentration of wealth — but this time, the capitalists are joining hands with and are actually amassing political power as well,” Noble said. “That’s different, and I think more dangerous to democracy, than the previous time.”

Noble wants the legislature to use its power to expand consumer protections and guardrails, incentivizing companies to create safer products. She also wants the legislature to keep its word to fund education, seeking to ensure that taxes — such as the millionaire’s tax — include specific language to fund schools.

“We’re not even covering the basics in education…there’s money here. We need to take the money from where it is and give it to the places we need it,” she said.