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The rapid rise of artificial intelligence is making it increasingly challenging for people to know whether an image is real or not. To help readers with this task, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Story Lab put together a visual guide that helps explain how to identify when an image is artificially created or manipulated. Meanwhile, the first – and perhaps only – debate between the candidates for president has put the US election race back in the spotlight. To aid those who may not fully understand the US electoral system, the Guardian put together a special explainer. This edition of our Top 10 in Data Journalism, which considered stories between September 2nd and 15th, also features a detailed guide from the Brazilian digital newspaper Nexo on “neglected tropical diseases,” a Reuters investigation into how a fire consumed a 14-story building in Spain in just two hours, and a disturbing analysis from The Washington Post of Google search data on everything that Americans want to “kill.”
Can You Spot a Fake Image?
Image: Screenshot, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
2024 is a bumper year for elections, and in many countries voters have been going to the polls for the first time since the rapid and dizzying rise of artificial intelligence. Given the importance of being able to identify when an image is real or not, Story Lab from Australia’s ABC News created an explanatory visual guide that explains methods to identify when an image is artificially created or manipulated, such as using digital forensics tools, reverse image search, and analysis of contextual clues. The report presents, for example, a manipulated image that appears to show a hurricane over Miami. In reality, the image is actually the combination of two photographs: a storm cell in Kansas superimposed over an aerial view of the city. The manipulation was identified using the WeVerify tool. According to StoryLab, only 39% of Australians believe they can verify whether information they find online is true.
How a Select Few Swing the US Election
Image: Screenshot, the Guardian
Despite millions of Americans casting their votes at the ballot box each election, only a tiny fraction of those have the ability to swing the race for one candidate or another. To explain the intricacies of the US electoral system, a team at the Guardian has created a visual explainer to show how the Electoral College votes work. According to the report, the last two presidential elections were decided by a few thousand votes: around 43,000 votes between the states of Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona allowed Joe Biden to win in 2020, while in 2016, Donald Trump’s leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – representing less than 1% of the popular vote – were what secured him the White House. According to the Guardian, these very narrow victories add fuel to growing criticism of this electoral system and the fact that the power to choose a president depends on where you live.
See also this interesting take from Argentina’s La Nación, which used artificial intelligence to examine the facial expressions and emotions of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump during this election cycle’s first – and perhaps only – presidential debate held on September 10. The model found Trump displayed signs of being annoyed 151 times, compared to Harris’s 13.
Understanding Neglected Tropical Diseases
Chart of the number of people who needed treatment for tropical diseases in 2021, per 100 inhabitants. Image: Screenshot, Nexo
Every year, millions of people around the world die from conditions for which there is already preventative treatment, medicine, or a cure. In this richly illustrated and graphically packed special report, the Brazilian digital newspaper Nexo delves into these “neglected tropical diseases,” exploring some of the 20 that make the World Health Organization’s list. The report explores why combating these diseases is important for reducing poverty and inequality, and graphically illustrates the distribution of diseases such as rabies and dengue fever, and explores which of these diseases have the greatest impact, as measured by years of life lost. The report also explains what the different pathogens are (such as fungi, viruses, and bacteria) why they are called tropical, and why they are neglected (spoiler alert: they receive very, very limited resources).
Xenophobic Speech and Germany’s AfD
The German site Tagesspiegel found that right-wing AfD politicians mentioned refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers in their speeches more than 2,700 times since 2014. Image: Screenshot, Tagesspeigel
The controversial Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party came first in the state elections in Thuringia earlier this month – the first time in post-war history that a far-right party has secured victory in a state election in the country. It also came a close second place in neighboring Saxony. The Innovation Lab team at Tagesspiegel used a language model to analyze all AfD speeches made in German state parliaments since 2014, totaling 340,000 paragraphs and more than 15 million words. Their conclusion? AfD deputies have been using “fear as a political instrument” for some time. Parliamentarians have not only been talking about the controversial topic of “remigration” in secret meetings, they wrote, but have been “paving the way for xenophobia” for the past 10 years.
Deadly Apartment Blaze in Spain
Image: Screenshot, Reuters
In February, a fire in an apartment in Valencia, Spain, spread out of control, consuming the entire building in just two hours. Ten people died and 15 were injured. To understand what happened – and compare the disturbing similarities between this case and the devastating 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, which killed 72 people – Reuters spoke to a number of experts to produce a visual explainer. According to the report, the Valencia fire was fueled by the use of flammable materials in the cladding panels on the building’s facade. While the panels appear solid, in reality they are a kind of “sandwich” between two thin sheets of aluminum, and a core of polyethylene, a petroleum derivative, the same material used in Grenfell Tower. Seven years after Grenfell, experts said, lessons from that tragedy “had gone unlearned.”
Brazil’s Forest Fires
Image: Screenshot, Financial Times
From Chernobyl in Ukraine to Galicia in Spain, and in Los Angeles on the US West Coast, our analysis this week found plenty of reports of wildfires around the globe. But the season has been particularly brutal in Brazil, where the total area burned this year is estimated at 34.5 million hectares — roughly the size of Germany — according to this report from the Financial Times. The newspaper says that while small forest fires are common at this time of year, particularly in the Cerrado, a tropical savanna in the center of the country, and in the wetlands of the Pantanal in the southwest, the intensity of this year’s fire season has alarmed authorities. The Brazilian Amazon, which accounts for about two-thirds of the world’s largest rainforest, saw the highest number of fires in 14 years in August, according to official figures.
Empty Offices
Image: Screenshot, Moody’s
Four years after the first COVID-19 lockdowns, some companies are calling an end to remote work and telling employees to return to the office. But according to this visual history from Moody’s, the vacancy rate for office buildings across the US is at an all-time high, at around 20% in the country’s major metropolitan areas. The team analyzed 618 commercial real estate submarkets in the US and compared central business districts with suburban areas to examine post-pandemic work patterns. The report allows readers to look at the situation in various parts of the US, and also looks at the relationship between commute times and the return to in-person work.
Anti-War Protests in Israel
Image: Screenshot, Al Jazeera
The one-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel edges nearer, but the situation in the Middle East is ever more complex. Using data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), Al Jazeera mapped the protests that have taken place in Israel between October 7, 2023 and August 30 of this year. There were at least 1,240 demonstrations, it found, and they are “becoming steadily more frequent.” The report provides a timeline of events, as well as the locations and reasons for the protests, most of which are calling for a ceasefire in Gaza to free the hostages still being held by Hamas. Elsewhere, Al Jazeera also mapped cross-border attacks between Israel and Lebanon, highlighting the arsenals of both countries: there were some 9,613 attacks between October 7 last year and September 6, around 80% of which were carried out by Israeli forces, they said.
What Americans Want to Kill, per Google
Image: Screenshot, The Washington Post
In this deep dive into the dark desires of the human mind, The Washington Post presents an analysis of Google search data on everything that Americans want to “kill.” To do this, the team used Google Trends data and analyzed hundreds of files covering two decades of search habits in the US. They present the results in a series of graphs divided by similar search themes – for example, insects, or plants – with the monthly average and geographic distribution of searches. According to the Post, many Americans, especially in rural areas, want to know “how to kill time,” but other searches are less benign.
Guatemala’s Informal Jobs Market
According to a a national survey, more than 7 in 10 workers in Guatemala are part of the informal economy. Image: Screenshot, Plaza Pública
This report, from the digital media outlet Plaza Pública, explores Guatemala’s jobs market, detailing how 7 in 10 people of working age with jobs are working in the informal economy. According to the analysis, which uses data from the 2023 National Survey of Living Conditions (Encovi), low levels of investment are limiting the creation of new formal jobs. The team use data to explore how the breakdown looks across the population, to explore average salaries in the formal market, and to chart the numbers working with – and without – a formal contract. According to Plaza Pública, an effective competition policy could increase productivity, and help GDP growth.
Ana Beatriz Assam is GIJN’s Portuguese editor and a Brazilian journalist. She has worked as a freelance reporter for the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, mainly covering stories featuring data journalism. She also works for the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji) as an assistant coordinator of journalism courses.
