Dara Kerr

Dara Kerr reports on how powerful technology companies shape money, safety and work as a tech reporter at the Guardian. Her current beat focuses on the industry’s power and influence on the world, and she treats technology stories as investigations into corporate behavior and real-world consequences rather than product news. She draws on years of reporting about labor, regulation and tech culture, so her coverage tends to follow the flow of power between boardrooms, politicians, workers and users.

Tech money, power and political influence

Kerr’s recent coverage at the Guardian includes close scrutiny of how digital assets and tech finance intersect with political power, such as her reporting on Donald Trump’s billion‑dollar income from crypto businesses in 2025 and what it reveals about the scale of money now coursing through the sector. She approaches stories like this through filings, corporate structures and campaign‑adjacent entities, treating crypto not as a novelty but as part of an influence network around major political figures. Her broader work on corporate lobbying and the choices tech companies make over our lives shows the same focus on institutions and decision‑makers rather than gadgets. In previous roles she has delved into big tech lobbying and the spread of anti‑vaccine misinformation on Facebook, framing platforms as political actors whose decisions shape public health and public debate. Across these pieces, the pattern is detailed reporting on documents, regulators and corporate executives, with an emphasis on who benefits and who bears the risk.

Safety crises at Musk’s companies

Kerr repeatedly returns to Elon Musk’s businesses as case studies in how engineering decisions, aesthetics and growth strategies translate into safety outcomes. She has written about fiery, deadly crashes involving Tesla’s Cybertruck, examining battery fires, crash dynamics and what they mean for occupants and bystanders. In those stories she follows individual incidents into questions about design priorities, testing, regulatory oversight and accountability when high‑end vehicles become sources of lethal risk.

She has also reported on xAI’s supercomputer facility in Memphis and its use of “illegal” generators, tracking how a cutting‑edge AI project interfaces with local rules, power infrastructure and community impact.

Taken together, these pieces show a reporter interested in the gap between corporate promises and on‑the‑ground conditions, and in the way Musk’s projects push against safety norms, permitting processes and public resources. Her tone stays spare and document‑driven, but the selection of stories consistently highlights the dangers created when tech leaders treat regulation as an obstacle rather than a boundary.

Labor and the on‑demand economy

Before joining the Guardian, Kerr built a deep portfolio on labor in technology, which still informs how she approaches current stories. At The Markup she focused on Silicon Valley employees, gig workers and warehouse staff, reporting on how companies redefine work and what that means for society.

Her investigations have examined the risks Uber and Lyft drivers face and the lack of protections those companies provide, connecting individual harms to systemic gaps in labor regulation and corporate policy.

Earlier at CNET she covered the on‑demand economy and tech culture, writing about Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Postmates, Doordash and related services as part of a changing employment landscape rather than just consumer convenience. She has reported on sexual assault in ride‑hailing, battles between gig platforms and government regulators, and the absence of basic protections for workers whose livelihoods depend on apps.

This history gives her a strong grounding in contracts, classification fights, lobbying campaigns and worker organizing, which shows up in how she now treats both Silicon Valley employees and gig workers as central figures in tech stories.

Online platforms and social harms

Kerr’s work also tracks how social platforms and recommendation systems expose users to serious physical and psychological risks. At NPR she reported on a mother’s fight with YouTube after her child died attempting a blackout challenge, using that case to probe how moderation systems, recommendation algorithms and corporate policies deal with dangerous viral content.

She has covered the spread of anti‑vaccine misinformation on Facebook, tying content decisions and enforcement gaps to broader public health consequences.

In these stories she combines individual narratives with detailed reporting on platform rules and enforcement, keeping attention on what the companies know, how they respond and who is harmed. Alongside her labor and safety coverage, this strand of work reinforces a through‑line: technology firms are treated as powerful institutions that must answer for the harms their products and policies create, whether on roads, in workplaces or on screens.

Across outlets, Kerr works in a mix of investigations, enterprise features and explanatory pieces rather than short transactional news. She is comfortable traveling and reporting on location when tech infrastructure or policy decisions reshape local communities, from the Texas‑Mexico border surveillance projects to Amazonian tribes using technology to fight deforestation. Her Guardian beat now pulls those threads together, with stories that read less like isolated tech incidents and more like chapters in a larger narrative about corporate power, public oversight and everyday life.