Taylor Hatmaker

Taylor Hatmaker is a technology journalist at Fast Company who traces how powerful platforms, tech policy, and internet culture shape everyday life and public discourse. Her coverage sits at the intersection of social media, online communities, and the real-world consequences of digital trends, with reporting that connects abstract policy debates to concrete human stakes. She brings a long track record in tech and culture reporting from major digital outlets to her current beat, carrying forward a consistent focus on how online systems govern speech, safety, and behaviour.

Social media platforms and tech policy

Hatmaker’s work has a sustained focus on the rules and power struggles around large social platforms, especially when they collide with government regulation and civil society. At TechCrunch, she covered social media, gaming and culture, with reporting that examined platform policies, moderation decisions, and the broader political context surrounding them. Her recent coverage includes explanatory pieces on the TikTok ban signed into law in the United States, charting how the legislation came together and what it means for ByteDance, lawmakers, and users. She also reports on high-profile legal fights involving tech companies and watchdog groups, such as a judge’s decision to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against an anti-hate research organisation, using these cases to show how platforms respond to scrutiny over harmful content. Across these stories, she writes in clear, direct prose that foregrounds the mechanics of policy and law without losing sight of how decisions ripple through online ecosystems.

Internet culture and online communities

A defining thread of Hatmaker’s career is deep coverage of internet culture and the communities that form around social platforms, games, and emerging digital spaces.

She launched and led an internet culture vertical at TechCrunch, building a body of work that treated memes, creator economies, and online subcultures as serious subjects tied to business incentives and platform design. Her reporting has tracked how platform policies reconfigure communities, from content moderation crackdowns to changes in recommendation algorithms and discovery tools. She consistently writes about the lived experience of people who inhabit these spaces - creators, community organisers, and everyday users - rather than only focusing on executive statements or product announcements.

Earlier in her career she held editing and reporting roles across digital publications that emphasised tech news and analysis, further grounding her coverage of online communities in long familiarity with how stories travel across the web.

Gaming, virtual worlds and online behaviour

Hatmaker has extensive experience reporting on video games and gaming-adjacent platforms, treating them as social networks with their own norms, economies and governance challenges. Her investigative work has included coverage of content moderation and platform policy across video games, looking at how companies police behaviour, handle harassment, and respond to emerging forms of misconduct in online play. She connects gaming stories to broader debates about speech and safety, showing how decisions in these environments feed into wider conversations about digital rights and online accountability.

In this strand of her work, she pays attention to player communities and the systems that structure their interactions, reflecting a consistent interest in how design choices and policies shape behaviour at scale.

Technology’s impact on health and everyday life

At Fast Company, Hatmaker extends her longstanding focus on platforms and policy into stories about how technology-linked trends affect personal decisions and public health.

Her article “A surprising pregnancy trend is alarming health experts” is an example of this approach, examining a reproductive health trend through the lens of expert concern and broader societal implications.[anchor] In parallel, her coverage of legislation like the TikTok ban traces how government action around a single app can transform daily routines, business models, and information access for large groups of people. Across outlets, she has covered privacy, policy and big tech, building a portfolio that treats technology not as a standalone industry but as an infrastructure that underpins culture, politics and individual wellbeing. She brings the same disciplined, policy-aware framing to stories about online safety, platform responsibility and emerging digital risks, making her coverage especially relevant when the human impact of technology is central to a story.

Hatmaker’s background includes senior and culture-editing roles at major tech and news publications, where she managed coverage at the intersection of tech, policy and regulation while editing and authoring stories on social media, gaming and online communities. She has reported for outlets that specialise in technology news, general digital reporting and investigative features, giving her a broad sense of how tech stories resonate across different audiences.

That experience informs her current work at Fast Company, where she continues to cover technology with a clear emphasis on platforms, policy and the real-world stakes of internet culture.