2025-11-21 09:03:24
Investigating big tech should not focus on the products and industry claims but rather the remarkably small group of companies and people exerting a growing power over the rest of us. And rather than being dazzled by the purported “magic behind the curtain” of AI, experts recommend that journalists focus instead on human choices and physical impact behind this booming industry.
These were two of the major themes from a high-level, all-day workshop on how journalists should tackle the new tech frontiers, at the kick-off of the 2025 Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJC25) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Collectively titled The Investigative Agenda for Technology Journalism, this invitation-only series of panel discussions included two dozen speakers, featuring veteran editors, reporters, and forensic investigators from five continents on the technology beat.
A packed conference hall heard that the rapidly moving frontiers of technology have created myriad new opportunities for exploitation and abuse for bad actors across the world, and powerful challenges for journalists seeking to hold them accountable. From deepfake videos and targeting of autonomous weapons to online hate and algorithmic bias, speakers explained how these threats and the digital camouflage they employ require a combination of new skills, traditional journalistic methods, and the help of peers to understand and expose.
The sessions detailed how the stakes for holding technology corporations and their government allies accountable were higher than ever, with authoritarianism growing in concert, and vulnerable communities and the environment suffering direct harms from its spread into the Global South. One leading forensic investigator revealed that a second boom in cyber surveillance of journalists and dissidents — including zero-click spyware that quietly turns your phone into a surveillance tool — was imminent.
To encourage candid discussion, the day’s series of meetings was held under the Chatham House Rule, where the content of the discussion may be disclosed, but where the identity of participants and their comments may not be supplied without their express permission. Those identified in this report provided consent to use their names and quoted remarks.
“In terms of the most important investigative priorities, I think that’s to center power as the lens through which you examine tech, because there is a really, really tiny group of people making extraordinarily profound decisions that will have ripple effects on supply chains; on the environment; communities all around the world,” said Karen Hao, one of the world’s leading AI watchdogs, and the best-selling author of “Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race For Total Domination.”
Natalia Viana, co-founder and executive director of Agência Pública, one of Latin America’s largest nonprofit newsrooms, told attendees: “Many journalists think covering big tech is about covering tech — but it should be about investigating the people who make the decisions behind the algorithms and the market bubbles. These are the most powerful companies in history — and their products affect every aspect of our lives and democracies. It’s a huge power imbalance. They are very hierarchical — a handful of mostly men, and their tactics are reproduced everywhere.”
Despite generative AI’s enduring problems with bias and made-up answers, several reporters advocated for the careful, fact-checked use of large language model chatbots to produce useful and sometimes essential leads and pattern-matching at the outset of investigations. Notably, one veteran editor suggested that – because investigative journalism was a “high-skill, low-efficiency craft” with fewer than 10,000 full-time practitioners worldwide – the investigative journalism community should create its own LLMs to dramatically boost efficiency, and ultimately empower citizens to join the accountability fight.
But AI’s unchecked growth and influence is deeply rooted in mistaken public perceptions.
“I try to debunk all the different narratives that come out of Silicon Valley,” said Hao. “I think the central pillar of [big tech] is narrative: the ability to control, and shape the narrative that allows them to continue expanding and gaining unfettered access to resources.”
Other misleading narratives that reporters should challenge include:
Image: Slide at GIJC25
The targeting and dehumanization of people and groups for who they are is not only on the rise, but, increasingly, is being amplified by populist governments that profit by scapegoating minorities. While news media generally covers the aftermath of online hate, such as public violence, experts recommend more scrutiny of the actual hate campaigns, their origins, and the growing monetization of toxic messaging.
Methods to investigate hate that panelists recommended included:
However, in addition to their accountability role, journalists also have a public service role to play in countering hate as well as not inadvertently amplifying it.
To establish a journalistic corollary to the Hippocratic Oath of “first, do no harm,” panelists urged other reporters to follow these best practices:
Panelists shared chilling cases of tech abuse from their recent investigations: such how the identities of female Ukrainian journalists were stolen and used for AI-generated, Russian propaganda deepfake videos that attracted 24 million views; how the Mexican army secretly surveilled human rights activists; how Israel’s military used a machine learning program to “generate” hundreds of new targets, with lethal consequences for civilians in Gaza.
They also heard about the need for journalists on this beat to be deeply sensitive to less technologically literate audiences.
“Remember to imagine communities where ‘algorithm’ doesn’t even exist in their mother tongue,” an African data journalist pointed out. “Older generations are clicking on all sorts of links, and at the mercy of scamsters without our help. How do we explain phishing to these vulnerable people? Tech systems are entrenching systemic injustice in the Global South.”
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s global reporter and impact editor. A former chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world, and has also served as an assignments editor for newsrooms in the UK, US, and Africa.
2025-11-20 22:00:37
Chronic diseases driven by tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods, and fossil fuels claim millions of lives annually, yet remain underreported.
“One in every three deaths can be linked to just four industries,” said Asraa Mustufa, the managing editor of The Examination, a nonprofit investigative outlet focused on health, in a session that examined the quiet, decades-long crises caused by corporate products and policy influence.
Speaking at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Malaysia, a panel of veteran health and environmental reporters and civil society representatives talked about these industries shape science, manipulate regulation, and deploy sophisticated public relations tactics to obscure harm. They also shared tools for getting inside corporate strategy, and for keeping investigations alive despite newsroom pressure.
Chee Yoke Ling, executive director of the nonprofit research and advocacy group Third World Network, emphasized that corporate influence rarely comes from a single company. Instead, reporters must follow webs of associations and trade groups. “Most of the time, you’re not dealing with one company. You’re dealing with associations, fronts, and funders who are too big and too coordinated to track casually.”
She noted that industry pressure has intensified over the past decade, especially in global health policymaking, where private foundations and industry-linked groups have gained extraordinary influence. Reporters, she stressed, need to “demystify the science and demystify the law” to hold these forces accountable and inform the public.
Fabiola Torres, founder of the Peruvian investigative outlet Salud con Lupa, explained how harmful-product industries exert their power by:
Fabiola Torres. Image: Alyaa Abdul Aziz Alhadjri for GIJN
She urged journalists wanting to report on the biggest corporate killers to look into each one of those layers. “These stories require meticulous planning. They are not short-term beats. They take months, sometimes years,” she acknowledged.
Owen Pinnel of BBC Eye Investigations focused on the fossil fuel sector, not only the main driver of global warming, but also the leading cause of air pollution, which the World Health Organization estimates causes 6.7 million premature deaths each year.
Pinnel highlighted a rapid proliferation of greenwashing over the past decade. Companies have increased advertising budgets to paint themselves as climate champions, and “cooked their ESG [environmental, social, governance] books” by offloading their dirtiest assets into shell companies so that their emissions would not count as ‘theirs.’
Reporters should treat these claims with skepticism, he said.
“Look closely at what they call ‘solutions.’ Carbon capture devices on luxury buildings in UAE, glossy ESG claims, or offsets that don’t add up,” he cautioned.
He also urged journalists to look at “sacrifice zones,” communities bearing the toxic burden of fossil fuel production. “There’s so much to expose,” he said, pointing to his work in Iraq, but noting that such zones exist on every continent.
A major theme of the panel discussion was the mismatch between newsroom cycles and slow-burn crises. Chronic disease develops over decades. Corporate strategies evolve over years. Legislation takes even longer. Meanwhile, newsrooms operate on daily deadlines.
“These stories compete with the immediate disasters of the day. One of the main challenges can be getting the attention of the editors who deal with the immediacy of the deaths in war zones, and sometimes don’t see this kind of reporting as urgent, even though they kill far more people,” said Pinnel.
Torres described her strategy for keeping these stories alive: publishing investigations alongside radio programs, videos, school materials, and public-health workshops to ensure “the story doesn’t just disappear after one day.”
Questions from the audience during the session. Image: Alyaa Abdul Aziz Alhadjri for GIJN
Asraa Mustufa offered practical investigative techniques that have worked for The Examination, which has partnered on more than 270 stories with 70 outlets. “A mantra we’ve developed at The Examination is to try to get inside the company or try to get to the company in their world. Especially when they talk about these strategies that are having disproportionate health impacts.”
“How do you do that?” she asked. “It sounds really hard but one of the most obvious ways is just to go where they are. Go to their natural habitats. Those are conferences they attend, or better, the ones they are sponsoring. Their investor board meetings. But also, parliamentary disclosures. Industry document library. University researchers.”
And she urged journalists not to lose sight of one of the most important aspects of journalism “cultivating sources who used to work there, or who still work there but who are not happy.”
The greatest insight often comes from companies “in their own words,” she said, in speeches, filings, and investor pitches that reveal strategies long before the public sees their impact.
“The bottom line is who’s making bank off the health information you’re seeing?” she said, reminding journalists not to lose sight of the money question.
It was a reminder that behind slow-moving crises, shifting narratives, and manufactured doubts, someone is profiting, and that’s where the investigative trail begins.
2025-11-20 13:00:38
GIJN is excited to launch a new edition of the Sigma Awards, which recognizes the best of global data journalism. Submissions are now open for data projects published in 2025.
We are inviting journalists from all regions to identify their best data work and submit it for consideration. We are maintaining the no-category rule for the award and will have experts in data journalism from around the world to serve on the jury and prize committee. Work from individuals and small newsrooms, as well as larger newsroom teams, is welcome.
The Sigma Awards were founded in 2019, and GIJN became the official host organization earlier this year.
Criteria for the 2026 Award
All entries submitted to the Sigma Awards are available on a database that allows the community to learn from the work of others, to get inspiration, and to explore the growth and evolution of data journalism from around the world over the years.
The last edition of the award received submissions of 498 data journalism submissions from dozens of countries and six regions. In this story, applicants can read more about the 2025 Sigma Award winners, including details on the tools and techniques they used in the winning projects.
Apply for the 2026 Awards here, and if you have any questions about the competition, you can get in touch with us at [email protected]. We are looking forward to hearing from you!
2025-11-19 16:00:29
Sky News created dummy accounts to test whether the social media site X, under Elon Musk’s ownership, favors right-wing political rhetoric in the UK. Working with academics and a custom-trained language model, the experiment showed that users of all political leanings were consistently fed more right-wing content than left-leaning or neutral posts. In this edition of our Data Journalism Top 10, covering stories from November 5 to 17, we also feature Greek outlet Solomon’s investigation into livestock loss as a result of sheeppox in Greece, The Globe and Mail and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s exposé into illicit gold-mining in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, The Washington Post’s analysis of ChatGPT conversations, and National Geographic’s immersive journey into how the pyramids were built in Egypt.
Image: Screenshot / Sky News
Sky News’s data and forensics team set out to test whether X’s algorithm favors right-wing politics by running a controlled experiment using nine newly created test accounts designed to mimic British users with left-leaning, right-leaning, or neutral interests. Over two weeks, the team collected posts from each account’s “For You” feed, building a dataset of 90,000 posts from 22,000 accounts. Working with academics, they classified nearly 6,000 accounts by political alignment using a custom-trained large language model. Using color-coded circle-packing charts, they found more than 60% of political content shown came from right-wing accounts, neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing, and over half of all political posts originated from accounts classified as extreme — 37% of them from extreme right accounts that “that often include toxic language, such as dehumanizing language or endorsement of violence, or conspiracy theories.” The team said the findings “indicate a clear imbalance of content” on the platform owned by Elon Musk.
Image: Screenshot, FT
In this visual feature, the Financial Times charts the unravelling of The Line — Saudi Arabia’s ambitious plan to build a 500 meter-high mirrored city, Neom, for nine million people. Drawing on interviews with more than 20 architects, engineers, and former senior executives, the FT shows how Mohammed bin Salman’s flagship project has been strained by physics, logistics, and soaring costs. Using scrollymaps, scaled construction models, and before-and-after satellite imagery, the piece contrasts the project’s early promises with what has actually materialized on the ground. Construction has slowed dramatically, according to the report, and the project’s initial $1.6 trillion budget has ballooned to internal estimates of around $4.5 trillion, “roughly the size of Germany’s annual economic output.” Modules making up The Line would require quantities of steel, concrete, and cladding that would overwhelm global supply chains. Experts also warn that the structure would obstruct major bird and mammal migration routes, leaving insiders increasingly convinced that the project is drifting, “undone by the laws of physics and finance.”
A graphic showing the number of animals killed since the start of the outbreak on the left, and detailing how vital Thessaly is in Greek agriculture. Image: Screenshot, Solomon
Reporters at the investigative outlet Solomon decided to delve into a major goat- and sheeppox outbreak in Greece, one of the country’s “worst livestock crises in decades.” Through access to internal correspondence from EU agencies and Greek authorities, and freedom of information requests, reporters showed that although the EU recommended early vaccinations before the epidemic spread from northeastern Greece across the mainland and into Thessaly, the national government instead decided to rely almost exclusively on the mass culling of animals. Solomon documented dozens of outbreaks across multiple regions as the pox spread. Since the outbreak began, more than 350,000 animals have been slaughtered nationwide, including over 160,000 in Thessaly alone, causing huge losses in milk and cheese production. Reporters also used satellite imagery to identify mass animal-burial sites amid warnings that poorly managed disposal poses risks of environmental contamination and future resurgence.
Image: Screenshot, The Globe and Mail
In post-war Tigray, a multibillion-dollar gold rush is gripping the region, lining the pockets of armed actors and foreign financiers while devastating local communities. A global surge in gold prices, driven by countries like the US and China racing to stockpile reserves, is part of what is driving the boom in a place “where an emerging resource economy must contend with a thriving illicit one.” Reporters from The Globe and Mail and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism spent weeks in the region diving into illicit mining in particular, interviewing miners, security officials, government insiders, and community members, and analyzed satellite imagery alongside hundreds of leaked documents, financial statements, and public records. Internal government data show Ethiopia’s central bank has bought more than 18,000kg of gold from Tigray’s artisanal miners — 30 times what the region was projected to legally produce.
Image: Screenshot, National Geographic
National Geographic revisited the mystery of how the Pyramids of Giza — the last surviving Wonder of the Ancient World — were built. Drawing on a 4,600-year-old journal that was discovered along with the Red Sea Scrolls in 2013, the story hints at how a now-lost branch of the Nile was used to transport massive stone blocks to the plateau. In 2023, researchers used modern geophysical surveys, radar satellite imagery, and deep soil-coring, to trace the vanished waterway, which aligns not only with Giza but more than 30 nearby pyramids. The piece combines illustrated maps evoking papyrus scrolls with annotated diagrams and cutaway sketches that unpack the engineering behind the monument — from boating 15-ton blocks upriver to pulling them up more than 1,600-foot-long ramp systems, the immersive visual reconstruction reframed how the ancient Egyptians managed such a remarkable feat of engineering.
Image: Screenshot, Washington Post
According to OpenAI, more than 800 million people use ChatGPT every week. Although the vast majority of those conversations are private, The Washington Post was able to analyze 47,000 publicly-shared ChatGPT conversations to understand how people actually use the tool. Reporters downloaded more than 93,000 chats from the Internet Archive, focusing on 47,000 chat sessions since June 2024, conducted primarily in English. As they went through tens of thousands of exchanges, from relationship worries to philosophical debates, a telling pattern revealed itself: more than one in 10 conversations revolved around emotional or existential questions, and ChatGPT consistently echoed users’ views, using responses with “yes” nearly 10 times more often than “no.” The dataset also revealed how often people shared private information, sought legal or medical help, or nudged the model into endorsing conspiracies, offering a rare, data-rich glimpse into the way humans relate to AI.
Image: Screenshot, Equality Labs
Zohran Mamdani, who was recently elected as New York City’s first Muslim and first South Asian-American mayor, was met with a surge of online hate during his campaign, according to this report by Equality Labs. The year-long research project set out to investigate the increase of Islamophobic and xenophobic online attacks against the candidate, who moved to the United States as a seven-year-old child. Using a mixed-methods approach, including qualitative coding and quantitative trend analysis, researchers manually analyzed 500 posts from June to October 2025 that targeted Mamdani, finding 80% of targeted posts were Islamophobic, 5% called for the politician’s deportation or denaturalization, and 3.6% featured disinformation about his wife and family. The study also mapped amplification networks, identifying the domestic and international political figures pushing “bigoted disinformation” narratives.
Image: Screenshot, The Economist
The Economist’s visual guide charted how today’s AI boom may be echoing the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s — and sets out the possible impact a market crash or correction might have. Drawing on historical market data, household-wealth statistics, and S&P 500 composition over time, its visualizations compared today’s “mania over AI” with those of the past. Line charts show the growth of the S&P 500’s market value as a share of US GDP, growing household exposure to equities, foreign versus domestic stock ownership, and the concentration of the index’s top 20 firms. Using treemaps, the data shows that AI-related tech valuations, led by Nvidia and other AI-heavy giants, now represent 52% of the S&P 500, higher than the 39% internet related firms made up at the height of the dotcom era. With US households holding $42 trillion in equities, The Economist estimates that a crash today would hit far more ordinary Americans.
Tracking changes in the energy mix worldwide. Image: Screenshot, Der Spiegel
When the Paris Agreement was codified 10 years ago, nearly 200 countries pledged to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Using data from the Global Carbon Project, the International Energy Agency, and other sources, Der Spiegel had taken stock of which countries have followed through by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. Through scrolling charts and country comparisons, the analysis shows how CO₂ emissions have shifted since 2015, for example, rising sharply in India and China while falling steeply in Germany and Scandinavian countries. Reporters visualized the record growth in solar and wind by comparing the energy mix of a selection of countries from 2000 to 2024 in a series of area charts. While the shift to renewables is a positive move, it isn’t offsetting slow progress in transport or the backpedalling of countries like the US who are now extracting more fossil fuels, reporters warned. By combining historical emissions data and current policy pathways, the piece points to a clear pattern: despite rapid advances in renewables, many climate researchers believe global emissions remain too high to keep the 1.5°C target alive.
Also of note this week, Die Zeit’s climate change interactive, which asks readers to imagine climate change in the context of how their children could live through it.
Image: Screenshot, Nathan Yau
Nathan Yau visualizes how men and women spend their days differently in the US using estimates based on data from American Community Survey, which asked participants to log what they do during a 24-hour period. Using a “difference chart,” which shows two overlapping lines of male and female time use, Yau found that women spend substantially more time on household tasks, such as cleaning, cooking, laundry, and caregiving, while men spend more time on work, sports, and socializing. The disparities hold consistently across weekdays, weekends, and employment status.
Hanna Duggal is a data journalist at AJ Labs, the data, visual storytelling, and experiments team of Al Jazeera and a GIJN contributor. She has reported on issues such as policing, surveillance, and protests using data, and reported for GIJN on data journalism in the Middle East, investigating algorithms onTikTok, and on using data to investigate tribal lands in the US.
2025-11-18 08:23:18
