2025-04-18 15:00:54
Donald Trump’s stop-start trade war continues. The Financial Times explains how China’s record trade surplus helped trigger the tariff war with the US president, and The Washington Post provides a live tracker of all the tariffs that Trump has enacted, threatened, and canceled. This edition of our Top 10 in Data Journalism, which considered stories between March 22 and April 11, also highlights an investigation by InfoAmazonia and other outlets into plans for oil exploration in the Amazon rainforest region; a cross-border special feature on women who have to cross their country’s borders to get an abortion in Europe; a story by The Economist that explains the often political reasons why countries adopt certain time zones; and an Asahi Shimbun mapping of Japan’s spring cherry blossoms.
Image: Screenshot, Financial Times
According to the Financial Times, China’s record trade surplus — where a country’s exports exceed its imports — helped trigger the US president’s tariff war. China’s surplus last year reached almost US$1 trillion. Using Chinese customs data, the FT presents a series of charts on trade relations between Beijing and other countries and the products traded that add up to its 2024 surplus. The data shows how, for example, China produces almost a third of all the world’s manufactured goods and how the country is increasing its surplus through strategic trading partners. It also presents a series of maps showing how Chinese groups have significant stakes in key battery-making raw material mines around the world.
Still confused about the active and proposed US tariffs? Check out this live tracker from The Washington Post that provides an interactive and illustrated chart of the full tariff situation.
Image: Screenshot, The New York Times
In March, a high-ranking US government national security official inadvertently added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine to a group on the Signal messaging app, where US officials were discussing secret military plans. The journalist published a report detailing the content of conversations about airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, which were eventually carried out. The use of a commercial messaging app like Signal by such high-ranking officials to discuss such sensitive matters left many shocked. But, according to The New York Times, a closer look at the messages and where the group’s participants were when they were sent reveals that the security vulnerabilities were even more pronounced. The Times geolocated the group’s participants during the chats, using official photos and videos or those shared on social media and flight tracking information and metadata, and correlated their physical location on a map during the group’s three days of conversation. The results suggest that several of the officials may have engaged in confidential communications outside of secure environments or on personal devices that could be vulnerable to foreign intelligence exploitation and undermine relations with allies.
Image: Screenshot, Reuters
On March 28, a powerful 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Southeast Asia, with its epicenter near Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. It was the most powerful earthquake to hit the country since 1912 and the second deadliest in modern Myanmar history. The quake caused extensive damage in the country as well as in neighboring Thailand, collapsing buildings more than 600 miles away in Bangkok. Hundreds of homes and apartments were also damaged in Yunnan, China, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. To date, the death toll has risen to more than 5,400, with at least 5,350 in Myanmar and 51 in Thailand, and more than 11,400 injured. Using data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), Reuters created maps of the earthquake’s epicenter and the region’s earthquake history, infographics on the different types of impact between tectonic plates and the depth of the earthquake, as well as a graph tracking the aftershocks.
InfoAmazonia found several countries in the Amazon region were among the top locations for new oil and gas exploration from 2022 and 2024. Image: Screenshot, InfoAmazonia
Oil exploration continues to gain ground in the world and now also threatens the world’s largest tropical forest. According to InfoAmazonia, almost a fifth of the recent discoveries of global oil and gas reserves found from 2022 and 2024 are located in the Amazon. The outlet analyzed data from Amazonian countries compiled up to July 2024 by the Arayara International Institute, which monitors oil activities in the region, and showed through a series of interactive maps where the areas officially delimited for fossil exploration in the region are located and how many of them overlap with Indigenous lands or conservation areas. The report is part of a special, six-part series, coordinated by InfoAmazonia in partnership with GK, Ojo Público, and Rutas del Conflicto, which mapped, over the last year, the socio-environmental damage caused by more than 50 years of oil extraction in the Amazon.
The Swiss-French newspaper 24 heures created Sankey diagrams to illustrate the sources of Switzerland’s population growth from 2011 to 2023. The diagram on the right shows that only 13% of the increase was the result of asylum seekers. Image: Screenshot, 24 heures
The Swiss-French daily newspaper 24 heures explored the reasons behind Switzerland’s population growth between 2011 and 2023. Using data from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO), the team showed that 2.4 million people settled in the country in those 13 years, including people from the European Union, asylum seekers, or refugees from Ukraine and how many of them were still in the country by the end of 2023. The figures are presented using a dynamic Sankey diagram, which illustrated the evolution of different types of residence permits in the country since 2011. The report also highlighted that, in the period analyzed, around 300,000 people arrived in Switzerland under asylum, roughly 13% of the period’s total immigration. The newspaper noted that this share only contributes marginally to net population growth in Switzerland, but it is precisely the target of an initiative by the right-wing populist Swiss People’s Party, which demands that the Swiss population not exceed 10 million before 2050 and calls on government agencies to take action if that happens. A German-language version of the story is also available.
Image: Screenshot, the Guardian
As soon as the new administration of US President Donald Trump took office, it began censoring mentions of climate change, climate crisis, and its consequences from several government websites. It also deleted the so-called Future Risk Index, a searchable tool developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and launched in December 2024. Based on data from several US federal government agencies, the index provided an overall risk rating, county by county, of the vulnerability of its population to climate shocks and information on projected annual losses this century due to climate threats exacerbated by global warming. That data was preserved by the data consultancy Fulton Ring and is now being used by the Guardian to resurrect and showcase the tool, which the report says would be the first free resource to show how much the impacts of climate change will cost US communities — and provide crucial planning information for local governments, insurers, utilities and others who rely on FEMA. According to the report, the United States was hit by 27 disasters in 2024 that cost $1 billion or more in damages.
A map detailing the legal abortion time limits, in weeks of pregnancy, for each country in Europe. Image: Screenshot, Público
Every year, more than 5,000 European women cross the borders of their countries of origin to access abortion, even from places where the procedure is authorized. This figure was revealed by the cross-border investigation Exporting Abortion, coordinated by the Spanish newspaper Público and published by 11 media outlets from different European countries. Through data and personal testimonies, the project exposed the journeys that European women make to have the procedure in other countries and the varied reasons for this phenomenon, like if the pregnancy is already more advanced than the legal time limit for abortion in a given country or when the fetus has a malformation that local doctors do not consider serious enough to justify terminating the pregnancy. The report features a series of graphs, such as the largest flows of women seeking abortions between European countries between 2019 and 2023, and countries where more women have had abortions abroad than in their own country, such as Poland and Malta. You can read this report in other languages, as well as the other reports in the project here.
Ranking the Wealthiest Russians
Image: Screenshot, Forbes
International sanctions imposed on Russia by several countries since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 do not seem to have prevented Russian businessmen from increasing their personal wealth. According to Forbes’ annual ranking of the richest people on Earth, in 2024 the number of billionaires from Russia increased from 125 to 146 people, the highest number in its history. In addition, another record was broken: the combined wealth of Russian billionaires reached US$625.5 billion — the highest value since 2021, the year before the start of the conflict. In addition to graphs, Forbes Russia also presented profiles of the top 20 in the ranking, providing a wide variety of information about each one, such as their net worth, sources of wealth, hobbies, first businesses, and even what sanctions they are subject to.
Image: Screenshot, The Economist
The Economist notes that, although the basis for a global time zone system was agreed upon during the International Meridian Conference of 1884, without an international organization responsible for this system, it is up to countries to choose their own time zone. And although most nations stick close to solar time, others are more “creative,” for reasons that are often political, economic, or nationalistic. The report presented some examples, followed by maps, such as the city of Kashgar, in the far west of China, where the clock reads 10 a.m. when the sun rises in January. Just across the border in Afghanistan, at this same moment, the clocks read 7 a.m. According to the report, this is the largest time difference between land borders on the planet and exists because, since it was founded in 1949, the People’s Republic of China has maintained a single shared time zone: “Beijing time.” Meanwhile, Russia has 11 time zones — a source of pride. Another curious example is Spain, which has been using Central European Time since the Franco dictatorship era, when it sought to align itself with Nazi Germany, even though by geography Spanish clocks should be one hour behind CET.
Image: Screenshot, The Pudding
Did you know that one of the most streamed songs of last year, the controversial “Not Like Us” by US rapper Kendrick Lamar contains a sample of the song “I Believe to My Soul” by composer Monk Higgins, which in turn is a cover of a song of the same name by singer Ray Charles? Or that Korean rapper J-Hope’s 2022 song “What If” has roots going back nearly 150 years, to Edvard Grieg’s 1876 orchestral piece “In the Hall of the Mountain King?” In this special, The Pudding tells this and other stories while exploring music’s shared DNA. By considering elements such as samples, remixes, interpolations, and covers, the report traces back through albums to show how some musical legacies are quite obvious and others are much more complex, linking very different songs that span different genres, cultures, and even centuries, forming true musical family trees. Sound on!
Image: Screenshot, Asahi Shimbun
One of the most anticipated events for Japanese people and tourists who choose this time of year to visit the country has finally arrived: the blooming of cherry blossoms. To help fans of these beautiful trees, the Asahi Shimbun created the National Sakura Map, a photographic mapping of the event that is updated periodically. The century-old Japanese newspaper has assigned journalists to cover the country from Kyushu to Hokkaido, taking photos of cherry blossoms in full bloom and reporting on them for about 45 days. The photos on the map are created based on the location information of the reporter’s smartphone, and the cherry blossom forecasts use data from Weather Map.
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.
2025-04-18 08:14:07
2025-04-17 15:00:34
When Match.com launched in 1995 in the pre-app era of chat rooms and dial-up internet, it was the first online dating site. Since then, its parent company, Match Group, has grown into an $8.5 billion global conglomerate that controls half of the global online dating market, which has millions of users worldwide swiping in pursuit of romance on its platforms, which include Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, PlentyofFish, and OKCupid.
The Match Group claims that their apps have been downloaded 750 million times, and its Ipsos-led Relationship Report claims that 40% of all relationships in the US start online. These numbers raise concerns about the long-term implications of having a significant proportion of human connections mediated by digital screens on profit-driven platforms. One principal and immediate concern is user safety — particularly for apps designed to facilitate offline connections.
The UN warned this year that online attacks against women are getting worse and that this trend can influence offline interactions. In 2022, researchers at Brigham Young University published an analysis of more than 3,000 sexual assault cases and observed that “dating-app-facilitated sexual assault” happened faster and was more violent than when the perpetrator met the victim elsewhere.
“It’s a really scary study,” says Emily Elena Dugdale, a Pulitzer Center AI Accountability Fellow and lead reporter for The Dating Apps Reporting Project. Dugdale says that BYU’s research sparked their 18-month investigation into how the Match Group was addressing privacy and security issues and upholding its pledge to “make dating safer.”
In January, Dugdale, who is based in Los Angeles, and Bay Area-based Poynter Fellow Hanisha Harjani published Rape Under Wraps: How Tinder, Hinge and Their Corporate Owner Chose Profits over Safety. This exposé, co-published by the Guardian and The 19th, examined shortcomings in the Match Trust and Safety department’s response to reports of sexually violent users. Journalist Aaron Glantz and Sisi Wei from the nonprofit newsroom The Markup edited the investigation.
“If you are someone who digs into companies and institutions of power, you will probably have a very healthy level of skepticism in general about anything that promises you that you are going to be fine using it or doing things,” says Dugdale. “If you’ve been online for decades, you know that regulating online spaces is not easy.”
Hanisha Harjani (left) and Emily Elena Dugdale (center) investigated failures in the privacy and security protocols on Match’s dating apps, which they found enabled systemic abuse. Aaron Glantz helped edit the exposé. Image: Courtesy of the authors
The investigation reported that, according to internal documents, the company had known since at least 2016 about abusive users on its dating apps but chose to “leave millions of people in the dark,” despite mounting pressure within and outside the company — including from lawmakers — to address and release accurate information on the problem.
Their investigation opens with the case of Denver-based cardiologist Stephen Matthews, who was convicted in October 2024 and sentenced to 158 years to life in prison for rape, assault, and drugging multiple women he connected with on Hinge. The pair’s reporting found that Match’s overwhelmed rape reporting system enabled Matthews to return to the app and commit further assaults, despite multiple women reporting him. Even after someone filed a police report, they write, the only thing that got him off the company’s dating apps was his arrest.
“If you’re in a bar, and someone’s being creepy to you, you’re going to tell the bartender or the bouncer and that guy is going to get kicked out,” explains Dugdale. “With these apps, the bouncer didn’t work. There is no real bouncer. These people can come back.”
Match Group’s safety policy states that when a user is reported for assault, all accounts associated with that user will be banned from their platforms. Safety measures they list include automatic scans of profiles for “red-flag” language or images, ongoing scans for fraudulent profiles, and manual reviews of suspicious profiles and user-generated reports.
Users can use in-app tools to file reports. The investigation notes that since 2019 users reported for rape and assault on any of its apps are recorded in a central database. According to company sources, by 2022, the system — named Sentinel — was collecting hundreds of incidents every week. A slide from an internal 2021 presentation shown to employees and external safety experts and obtained by the Dating App Reporting Project indicates that the company was unsure just how much to reveal to users.
To find out what the company was doing about reported assaults, the team reviewed hundreds of pages of internal company documents and court records. Because Match Group is a public company, they also had access to SEC filings and investment reports. They also held dozens of interviews with current and former employees and survivors of sexual violence.
The investigation ran parallel to coverage of the Matthews case, which involved locating multiple women he had preyed on and reporting on an ongoing case in Colorado. While these women ultimately declined interviews, a decision the investigative team respected, details from court hearings reported with the assistance of Colorado-based stringer Stephanie Wolf were incorporated.
“It was really important for me not to focus so much on gratuitous descriptions of the actual assaults and the crime. I did not want that to be the focus of the story,” says Dugdale, who collaborated with Harjani to tell the stories of targeted women using court reports, avoiding a sensationalistic approach.
“I wanted readers to have enough information to understand how easy it is for something like this to happen, to understand the fear that people felt, knowing that they couldn’t remember these things that happened to them because they were drugged. There was physical evidence on their bodies that underscores the severity of the abuse.” Attorneys representing the women stated that much of the violence Matthews inflicted could have been avoided.
They also created an investigative data experiment to test whether the company banned users reported for sexual assault. Working with The Markup’s Natasha Uzcátegui-Liggett, they created more than 50 accounts across multiple platforms. They found that while accounts reported for assault were often banned within two days, it wasn’t difficult to create new accounts with the same information or with simple changes to biographical details. In the process, they consulted online guides on getting back on dating apps after a ban.
The investigation asserted that, while the company does have the resources, tools, and investigative procedures to make it harder for bad actors to return to apps, “internal documents show the company has resisted efforts to spread them across its apps, in part because safety protocols could stall corporate growth.”
Multiple sources within Match Group revealed that the company’s “obsession with metrics and having to stick with them is frustrating and potentially dangerous.” One source specifically described Match Group’s ongoing pledges to invest in safety as “safety theater.”
The Dating Apps Reporting Project sent Match Group a letter detailing their findings, which issued a short statement in response — not disputing that they had documented harm without sharing the information with the public but defending their safety efforts: “We take every report of misconduct seriously, and vigilantly remove and block accounts that have violated our rules regarding this behavior” and that they are industry leaders in employing “harassment-preventing AI tools, ID verification for profiles and investments in communicating with law enforcement.”
The reporting team uncovered internal Match communications where staff expressed concerns about the company’s growth metrics and the impact that might have on jeopardizing user safety. Image: Screenshot, The Markup
Dugdale’s background as a criminal justice beat reporter honed her investigative skills and informed a journalistic approach that avoided “true crime-like” narratives. She chose instead to demonstrate how systemic failures impacted individuals.
“I wanted to put the onus and focus on the companies that allow these men, primarily, [to harm]. Of course, there are people of all genders who are doing this,” Dugdale explains.
This approach was commended by Dr. Alessia Tranchese, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth who specializes in digital media and sexual violence against women. She praised how the article “starts off with an individual case, without over-sensationalising it to discuss a broader issue… It does not treat it as an isolated incident — which is so common in rape coverage — but looks at the broader structure that supports the violence of men against women.”
Dr. Tranchese told GIJN that “a crucial point for journalists is to see each case of sexual violence as part of a pattern of male abuse towards women, not as a specific case to be addressed, detached from the rest of society.”
Dr. Tong-jin Smith, a media research academic at Free University, Berlin and former journalist, agreed that the backlash against female empowerment as seen on social media is connected to how people interact on dating apps.
“Dating apps, in my mind, are the extension of social media. It comes from the same kind of thinking. Here it commodifies even more,” says Smith, who underscored the importance of investigative journalism in exposing the underlying mechanisms of the digital economy.
“It’s important that people are empowered. That they know what they are doing. That you realize that on the other end there is an actual human being, and that respect, and treating each other with respect is important,” Dr. Smith stated.
Dr. Smith advocates for media literacy training in schools, arguing it could equip young people to better navigate how platform economics, combined with the social pressures of our app-saturated world, can influence their perspectives and actions and make women vulnerable to violence. She emphasizes the crucial role of investigative journalists in covering this issue to explore solutions.
Having an impact that might protect dating app users was a key driver in the investigation. “I’m hopeful we’ll see some real, lasting change down the line,” says Dugdale, adding that she and her team were encouraged by positive feedback from employees at dating app companies and women victimized since the article’s publication. This feedback has re-engaged US lawmakers, raising hopes that increased pressure might influence Match Group’s priorities.
“The wheels of justice do take time,” she adds.
Sarah Karacs is a freelance journalist based in Berlin. She was previously a fellow with the European Journalism Observatory. Her work has been published by CNN, Der Spiegel, the New Statesman, and the South China Morning Post.
