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Mia Sato

Mia Sato

Platforms & Communities Reporter, The Verge

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 mia@theverge.com or email for her Signal number.

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This e-commerce darling couldn’t cut it IRL.

Outdoor Voices, a popular athleisure brand once seen as the next Lululemon, is closing all of its stores on Sunday. The direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand was valued at $110 million in 2018, but has been on the decline following internal friction. It’s the end of an era for the e-comm startup once considered a model for founders — the company will go back to selling strictly online.


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The child influencers making other people rich.

Kids are big business for brands looking to partner with influencers — and yet, Illinois is the only state in the US where kids appearing in sponcon are entitled to a cut of earnings.

This Cosmopolitan piece illustrates the longterm psychological effects of being a child working on online content. It also shows that our legal system has a lot of catching up to do with influencer culture.


The Kate Middleton photo scandal is a rare — and consequential — flub

A wave of wire services retracting a doctored image of the Princess of Wales and her kids set off a firestorm of conspiracy theories.

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Andreessen Horowitz was behind Kickstarter’s doomed Web3 pivot.

According to Fortune, the crowdfunding platform got a $100 million investment from the VC firm’s crypto fund — and the 2021 deal was meant to get Kickstarter into the Web3 hype cycle.

If you recall, the pivot was a disaster: after public outrage, Kickstarter formed a community advisory council, and the company ultimately decided to shift its attention away from the blockchain.

Correction March 12th 10:56AM ET: The Web3 pivot wasn’t a formal stipulation of the deal, as initially stated.


Marketers are about to infiltrate your favorite subreddits.

Ahead of its IPO, Reddit announced a set of tools for businesses that want to be more active on the platform — including the ability to see which subreddits are mentioning a brand. For businesses, Reddit says it’s a way to “establish and grow a meaningful organic presence on Reddit.” In other words: the brands are coming.


Reddit’s free business dashboard showing “Top communities mentioning Camp Glow” and trending topics.
Image: Reddit
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OpenAI’s tools showed bias when used for job recruiting.

Bloomberg prompted GPT-3.5 to sort equally-qualified resumes for jobs like software engineer and financial analyst. Over the course of thousands of tests, Bloomberg found resumes with names distinct to Black Americans were least likely to be ranked as top candidates.