Maria Puertas

Community and Social Media Manager

Maria Puertas was The Markup’s social media manager, executing the day-to-day promotion of our reporting and investigations. She left The Markup in June 2024.

Prior to The Markup, Maria worked at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she drove strategy on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Before that, she worked in various roles for digital agencies and political campaigns.

Maria is interested in how individuals navigate and develop online communities, a topic she has researched and is continuing to observe here at The Markup.

maria@themarkup.org

Photos of Maurice Newton, left, and Mia Townsend, right.

Machine Learning

False Alarm: How Wisconsin Uses Race and Income to Label Students “High Risk”

The Markup found the state’s decade-old dropout prediction algorithms don’t work and may be negatively influencing how educators perceive students of color

April 27, 2023 08:00 ET

Illustration of a person hunched over a hospital bed with their back facing towards the viewer. There is a clock and X-ray of a liver in the background.

Organ Failure

Poorer States Suffer Under New Organ Donation Rules, As Livers Go to Waste

Life-saving liver transplants have plummeted in some Southern and Midwestern states with higher death rates from liver disease, while New York and California have made big gains

March 21, 2023 14:00 ET

Show Your WorkOrgan Failure

How We Investigated UNOS’s Liver Allocation Policy

We found that new requirements led to plummeting transplants in some poorer states while New York and California saw big gains

March 21, 2023 14:00 ET

Photo illustration of a hand reaching out for help. The left half of it has a darker skin tone, while the right half has a whiter skin tone. In the background are torn photos of homeless encampments and tents, as well as numbers and abstract shapes.

L.A.’s Scoring System for Subsidized Housing Gives Black and Latino People Experiencing Homelessness Lower Priority Scores

An investigation by The Markup found racial disparities in L.A.’s intake system for unhoused people

February 28, 2023 08:00 ET

Illustration of a pink vacuum hose sucking up pixels and dirt from browser windows. Half of the browser windows are cleaned up of dirt and sparkling.

LevelUp

In 2023, Resolve to Fix Your Organization’s Meta Pixel Problem

It’s time to be proactive about user privacy. Find out if you’re sending too much data to Facebook—or if you need to send data at all

January 31, 2023 11:00 ET

Illustration of a person with purple hair and shoes, being dissolved into pixels. There are prescription bottles surrounding them and some of those bottles are also being dissolved into pixels.

Pixel Hunt

“Out Of Control”: Dozens of Telehealth Startups Sent Sensitive Health Information to Big Tech Companies

An investigation by The Markup and STAT found 49 out of 50 telehealth websites sharing health data via Big Tech’s tracking tools

December 13, 2022 06:00 ET

Working for an Algorithm

When Drivers Are Attacked, Uber Leaves Police Waiting for Help

An investigation by The Markup found that Uber is slow to respond to law enforcement requests, leaving drivers vulnerable to repeated attacks

December 9, 2022 09:00 ET

Illustration of the Meta hand with thumbs up holding a magnifying glass over a 1040 tax form.

Pixel Hunt

Tax Filing Websites Have Been Sending Users’ Financial Information to Facebook

The Markup found services including TaxAct, TaxSlayer, and H&R Block sending sensitive data

November 22, 2022 08:00 ET

In this photo illustration, Mastodon app homepage is seen displayed on a mobile phone screen.

The Breakdown

We Joined Mastodon. Here’s What We Learned About Privacy and Security

As Elon Musk sends Twitter into chaos, we’re sharing what we picked up about Mastodon as we selected a server

November 21, 2022 13:00 ET

An illustration of two houses, one receiving many dashed blue lines and the other receiving a single pink line, against an abstract street grid.

Still Loading

Dollars to Megabits, You May Be Paying 400 Times As Much As Your Neighbor for Internet Service

An investigation by The Markup found that AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered lower-income and least-White neighborhoods slow internet service for the same price as speedy connections they offered in other parts of town

October 19, 2022 06:51 ET

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