German Far Right’s TikTok Reach, Iran War’s Impact on Cooking Gas, Mapping the Nepal Floods, and ‘Strongest’ Country Passports

An election result in the German region of Saxony-Anhalt has highlighted the far right’s growing reach on social media, with Die Zeit examining how the party’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, dominated TikTok during the recent campaign. Our roundup of the Top 10 in Data Journalism, looking at stories from August 26 to September 8, also includes a New York Times 3D reconstruction of the deadly glacier collapse in Nepal, which killed more than 1,000 people. Elsewhere, we look at Bloomberg’s mapping of how LPG supply routes to India have been disrupted during the Iran war, Balady Atlas’ exploration of how the pilgrimages of Hajj and Umrah have changed, and La Nación’s analysis of the insults Argentine President Javier Milei has made in speeches and on social media.

Far Right German Party AfD’s Influence on TikTok

Image: Screenshot, Die Zeit

On Sunday, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a plurality in Saxony-Anhalt, an eastern German state, winning 44% of the vote in a state election. The AfD’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, dominated TikTok during the campaign, drawing millions of views. Die Zeit used data from the University of Potsdam’s Social Media Monitor to compare the reach of more than 2,700 political accounts between June 20 and August 20. A cumulative line chart showed Siegmund’s TikTok videos generating 18.7 million views during the period — millions more than the party’s overall leader, Alice Weidel. A comparison of political accounts found that Siegmund accounted for roughly one-third of political-account views nationwide and 66.2% of views in Saxony-Anhalt. The analysis also compared views per video, showing Siegmund averaging about 218,000 views compared with around 6,000 views per post for his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) challenger, Sven Schulze.

Mapping Nepal’s Landslide

Image: Screenshot, The New York Times

At the end of August, part of a glacier collapsed in the Himalayas, triggering devastating flooding along the Nepal-Tibet border that killed more than 1,000 people. The New York Times combined satellite imagery, radar data, and 3D terrain models to reconstruct the collapse and trace the resulting flood downstream. Imagery from before and after the landslide was mapped onto the 3D model to estimate the volume of rock and ice that fell. Radar data from the NASA-ISRO NISAR satellite showed that a section of rock at the glacier’s edge had begun moving a month before the collapse. The analysis suggests that repeated freeze-thaw cycles, glacier retreat, and warming permafrost gradually expanded cracks in the exposed rock, before more than seven billion cubic feet of rock and ice broke free and travelled over 60 miles at speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour — destroying bridges and towns in its path.

Cooking Gas and the Iran War: ‘Microcosm of a Global Crisis’

Image: Screenshot, Bloomberg

The war with Iran has seen the volume of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) transiting through the Strait of Hormuz on ships fall by nearly 80%. As a result, India, the world’s second largest buyer of the gas, has been forced to reconfigure its supply chain. Bloomberg’s Big Take used shipping data from Kpler and Argus Media to map tanker routes, import volumes, and illustrate how the US-Iran conflict has forced India to shift from Gulf suppliers, which had previously accounted for around 90% of imports. A pictogram showed the rerouted shipments, with colors indicating whether they came from the US, Gulf states, or elsewhere. A streamgraph of monthly LPG imports by origin showed the rise of US supplies as Gulf shipments fell, while a globe projection map compared shipping routes before and after the conflict began, showing many supertankers traveling around the Cape of Good Hope to the US Gulf Coast, turning a roughly two-week journey into one lasting more than 40 days. This rerouting has also contributed to new bottlenecks, including congestion at the Panama Canal.

Nvidia, ‘Dotcom Financing,’ and the AI Boom

Image: Screenshot, The Economist

Nvidia is now the world’s most valuable company, worth around US$5.4 trillion. Its chips power much of the world’s AI infrastructure, but it is also increasingly financing the companies that buy its chips, helping to create demand for its own products. The Economist mapped the web of deals behind this strategy, drawing on press reports to trace how Nvidia’s equity stakes, guarantees, and purchase commitments now extend across AI labs, neoclouds (which are specialized cloud infrastructure providers dedicated to AI workloads), and major data-center projects. A node diagram estimated Nvidia’s total exposure at US$297 billion, with dotted lines marking equity stakes and solid lines showing guarantees and purchase commitments to firms. These backstops make it easier for Nvidia’s customers to borrow money, build data centers, and buy more Nvidia chips, which some critics argue blurs the line between “enabling demand” and “creating it.” The report says the current situation has “more than a whiff” of the strategy of firms during the dotcom boom, amid warnings that in that period weaker-than-expected demand left some facing major losses.

Mapping All the World’s Passports

Image: Screenshot, sheets.works

There are 199 passports currently in use around the world, but the power they give their holders in terms of free movement varies dramatically. Sheets.works — an organization that “turns data into stories” — built an interactive map of all the passports with charts showing color, passport rankings, visa reciprocity, and cost. A world map displays all the passports — click through to find out what access each country’s passport allows in terms of travel, and where your country compares to others on the rankings.  Elsewhere, a color breakdown found that the majority of passports are red or blue, with green mostly found in North Africa, West Africa, and parts of the Persian Gulf. A bump chart tracked how passport rankings changed from 2006 to 2026, showing the UAE climbing from 62nd to 2nd, while the UK fell from 3rd to 6th and the US from 1st to 10th.

Measuring Argentinian President Milei’s Insults

Image: Screenshot, La Nación

The language used by Argentine President Javier Milei veers between restraint and confrontation, according to La Nación’s data team, which found he minimizes his personal attacks when “trying to project a more traditional presidential image.” The team analyzed 105 public appearances, totaling 74 hours of transcribed speech, alongside every post and quote-retweet from Milei’s X account between June 28 and August 26. An AI model categorized each insult on X, with line and bar charts tracking his hourly insult rate, most-used words, and the people he criticized. His rate of insults on X rose from 13.6 per hour in early August to 28.7 by the end of the month, with journalists being on the receiving end of most insults. “Mentirosos” — liars — and “mierdas” — a profanity — were each used 11 times, while a ranking identified the journalists who were targeted most frequently. One analyst described the attacks as a deliberate political strategy, arguing that confrontation has helped Milei build his anti-establishment image.

Investigating Children’s Care Homes in the UK 

Image: Screenshot, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

There is a £255 million (US$345 million) “shadow care market” when it comes to children who need to be looked after by the state in England, with hundreds of companies housing vulnerable children without registering with Ofsted — the UK’s official approval system for organizations providing care or education to children. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism used freedom of information requests and council payment records to identify more than 480 private companies that had operated unregistered homes over the previous two years, receiving around £250 million for 1,800 placements. A map showed the spread of the companies, while the investigation’s findings revealed how much individual councils had paid providers, including at least eight councils that had paid more than £1 million (US$1.35 million) for a single child placement. The analysis also tracked companies linked to safeguarding concerns, finding at least 16 operators connected to care failings and 44 allegations involving workers from one major staffing agency.

Americans on Their Relationship With AI Chatbots

Image: Screenshot, The Washington Post

More than a quarter of US adults now turn to AI chatbots for personal, emotional, or social conversations. The Washington Post partnered with North Carolina’s Elon University (no relation to the other Elon) to measure how deep this reliance runs. YouGov surveyed over 4,000 adults, then drew a representative subsample of 1,000 regular emotional-AI users, finding nearly 40% of adults under 50 qualify as “AI companion users.” The analysis paired survey percentages with respondents’ own written descriptions of their chatbot relationships, in addition to data from OpenAI and Anthropic on how their own users engage emotionally with the tools. Roughly a third of emotional-AI users said they consider their chatbot a friend, nearly four in 10 said they’ve told AI things they wouldn’t tell another person, and OpenAI reported that “self-expression” messages more than doubled since 2024.

Solar Power Growth in Africa

Image: Screenshot, Ember

Africa is on track to install a record 17 gigawatts (GW) of solar power in 2026, up 45% year-on-year, but much of the growth remains missing from official statistics. Energy think tank Ember worked in partnership with African Tech Futures Lab to analyze Chinese customs data across all 54 African countries (because 94% of panels installed in Africa are still imported from China). Line and bar charts tracked the rise in Chinese solar exports and compared Ember’s estimates with international figures, showing 12 GW of installed solar in 2025 versus estimates of 6.2 GW from the IEA and 4.6 GW from IRENA, suggesting that Africa’s growth in solar is far greater than reported. A horizontal stacked bar chart showed that around three-quarters of the solar capacity added between 2023 and 2025 was likely distributed solar — solar installed on roofs or local properties — much of it largely unrecorded. The analysis found 36 countries are expected to install record amounts in 2026, with the Democratic Republic of Congo growing 544% year-on-year, while South Africa’s share of continental installations is set to fall below 20% for the first time since 2019.

How Saudi Arabia’s Hajj and Umrah Pilgrimages Have Changed

Image: Screenshot, Balady Atlas

Saudi Arabia’s Hajj pilgrimage is seen as a sacred duty for every Muslim, and more than one million people visit Saudi Arabia each year. Umrah, a voluntary pilgrimage that shares many of the same rites and can be performed at any time of year, is even larger in scale: 42 million people in 2025. The Balady Atlas, which turns geospatial data into interactive maps, brought together data on pilgrims, transport, and weather, using interactive maps and time-series charts to show how the system operates. A world map traced the origins of Hajj pilgrims, with regional breakdowns explaining the Hajj quota system. A seasonal 3D timeline illustrated how the date of Hajj moves each year, alongside temperature comparisons showing how pilgrims faced hotter conditions in more recent years when it fell during the summer. Maps and annotated infographics showed the movement of pilgrims through Mecca and the holy sites, alongside explainers of how measures such as shaded routes, misting systems, and desert coolers have been designed and used to manage the heat.

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 on TikTok, and on using data to investigate what tribal lands in the US.