Mia Sato is a reporter at The Verge covering tech companies, platforms, and users. Since joining The Verge in 2021, she’s reported on the war in Ukraine and the spread of propaganda on TikTok; Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter; and how tech platforms and digital publishers are using artificial intelligence tools. Sato has written about tech platforms and communities since 2019. Before joining Vox Media she was a reporter at MIT Technology Review, where she covered the intersection of technology and the coronavirus pandemic. Prior to that she served as the audience engagement editor at The Markup. As a freelance reporter, she’s written about the subversive Hmong radio shows hosted on conference call software, online knitting activism, and the teens running businesses in Instagram comment sections. Her work has appeared in outlets like The New Republic, The Appeal, and Chicago Magazine. She is based in Brooklyn. Got a tip? Contact her at [email protected] or on Signal at miasato.11.
Donald Trump continues to push his trade war with Canada, saying in a Truth Social post that he’s adding an extra 25 percent tax on steel and aluminum imports — doubling what he announced on Monday. These additional tariffs are in retaliation for a surcharge on electricity coming into the US that Ontario implemented (which itself was retaliation for previous Trump tariffs).
His distorted face has been inescapable on social media — blown up and tinted like a blueberry, smooth and textureless, edited as a Minion and Furby. What began as “an easy own” has spiraled into a full-blown meme of making the vice president look like a child with a propeller hat and candy. Vance, apparently, is definitely not mad and is laughing, actually.
A day after workers at the US African Development Foundation blocked Elon Musk’s cronies from entering their office, DOGE employees came back with federal marshals, The New York Times reports. The DOGE team had been described as “very young men” with backpacks. This Times photo shows the DOGE employees entering on Thursday with their escort.
The National Republican Congressional Committee is instructing representatives to stop holding in-person town halls, Politico reports. In recent weeks videos have gone viral of heated town hall meetings, where Republican representatives are being grilled for their support of DOGE and Donald Trump’s agenda.
Republicans — including Trump — have pushed the false claim that the outrage at events are the work of “paid troublemakers.”
