Kamala Harris’ New Donor Wave, Elon Musk’s Hard Right Turn, Cheap Drone Warfare, and a Superyacht Suddenly Sinks

The year 2024 has been marked by elections in dozens of countries, with almost half the world’s population voting during this year — including the United States in November. While Republican candidate Donald Trump receives support from figures such as billionaire Elon Musk — who has become increasingly vocal about politics, as shown by a Wall Street Journal analysis — the Democratic campaign has gained new momentum after Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the party’s White House candidate, attracting millions of new small-sum donations, The New York Times reports.

The elections held last year are also still bearing fruit for data journalists — as investigations by the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) on Nigeria’s election and by Dismislab on political bots in Bangladesh reveal. This edition of our Top 10 in Data Journalism, which considered stories between August 19 and September 1, also highlights an investigation into the use of cheap drones in the war between Russia and Ukraine; a timeline of tensions in the Middle East; and an analysis of the sinking of the Bayesian superyacht.

Elon Musk Tweets His Way into Right-Wing Politics 

Image: Screenshot, The Wall Street Journal

Since completing his purchase of Twitter in October 2022, South African billionaire Elon Musk has made profound changes to the platform, including changing its name to “X,” ending account verification, and reinstating accounts banned for misinformation or inciting violence, such as former US President Donald Trump’s, to “protect free speech.” But Musk’s own relationship with the platform and the content he shares on it has also shifted, as The Wall Street Journal shows in this special report. The newspaper analyzed almost 42,000 of Musk’s interactions on X between 2019 and the end of July 2024 and mapped them using the same technology that powers artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.

According to the analysis, five years ago the owner of Tesla and SpaceX tweeted mainly about his companies, as well as memes and jokes. As his posts on the platform increased, so did Musk’s conversations mentioning political keywords — according to the Journal, by more than 200 times. Now, he posts almost daily to his more than 195 million followers about political issues, repeats right-wing talking points, and has even endorsed Trump’s election campaign, making him one of the former president’s most influential supporters.

New Kind of Warfare: Cheap Drones

Map showing Ukrainian and Russian drone attacks since Feb. 24, 2022. Image: Screenshot, Der Spiegel

On August 6, Ukrainian troops launched a counteroffensive on Russian territory that took many by surprise, advancing in the Kursk region. In this explainer, Der Spiegel shows how the war between Kyiv and Moscow has become “a testing ground for small, cheap drones.” According to the report, remotely controlled unmanned aircraft have been used in combat for years but were long considered expensive special weapons. In this conflict, however, so-called hobby drones — simpler models often used for taking aerial images of tourist sites — have become more common because they are cheap and easy to operate, with warheads often attached with adhesive tape. Destroying military equipment as expensive as tanks — which even at their cheapest cost millions of dollars — with cheap drones has been an effective attrition tactic on the battlefields in Ukraine.

Also check out this interesting infographic from Ukrainian data agency Texty.org.ua, which shows how — since the beginning of the war until August 29, 2024 — Russia has launched 11,919 long-range missiles and drones that have reached Ukrainian soil. According to data from the Ukrainian Armed Forces, there were an average of 26 launches every day, half of which were guaranteed hits.

Sinking of a Modern Superyacht

Image: Screenshot, Financial Times

Shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea are not uncommon. Every year, thousands of migrants drown in its waters trying to reach Europe from poor or war-torn countries. But the news of the sinking of the Bayesian, one of the largest sailing superyachts in the world, was unusual. Valued at US$35 million, the boat was anchored near the Italian city of Palermo and took just 16 minutes to sink, according to tracking data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS). There were 22 people on board, seven of whom died, including British tech mogul Mike Lynch — who was celebrating his acquittal after years of legal battles in which he was accused of planned fraud and inflating the value of his company by selling it to another tech company. But what led to this accident? The Financial Times reports on the probable causes of the tragedy — a storm with winds of over 110 kilometers per hour (68 miles per hour) and a possible waterspout, a form of tornado — and analyzes the possible influence of climate change on the increased frequency of this kind of meteorological phenomena.

Middle East Conflict Escalates

Iran and its proxies have launched more than 7,000 attacks on Israeli and Western targets in the past 10 months. Image: Screenshot, NZZ

Since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October last year, violence in the Middle East has spilled over the borders of the Gaza Strip and has been steadily escalating. Using a timeline and mapping of events, Swiss news outlet NZZ shows how disagreements between Israel and Iran — which supports Hamas — have resulted in the so-called “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran and including militias such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. The latter have launched more than 7,000 attacks on Israeli and Western targets in the past ten months, and have also been responsible for a series of attacks on Israeli and its allies’ targets that have disrupted shipping traffic in the Red Sea. In return, Israel and its allies have carried out around 18,000 retaliatory or pre-emptive strikes.

According to the report, violence has also increased in the West Bank, another Palestinian territory, where, since the conflict began, there have been roughly 6,000 violent clashes involving Israeli settlers and Israeli security forces and Palestinians and Hamas, according to the data from the ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data) research institute.

New Donors Excited About Kamala

Image: Screenshot, The New York Times

The New York Times reports that when current US President Joe Biden dropped his reelection campaign on July 21 and declared his support for Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the Democratic nominee, he unleashed a massive wave of low-dollar donations. According to the report’s estimates — using data from the Federal Election Commission — there were more than 1.5 million new donors in the last 11 days of July, making up 40% of all donors to the Democratic campaign, which has been raising money since April 2023. The report presents several graphs, including the age of Biden’s donors compared to Harris; a breakdown of donors to both politicians by postal code; the number of donors who contributed only to Biden’s reelection campaign; donors to both campaigns; and those who had not previously contributed and rushed to donate to Harris.

Is It Harder to Be a US Teenager Now Versus 20 Years Ago?

Image: Screenshot, Pew Research Center

Parents and teenagers sometimes don’t see eye to eye, but on the question of whether it is harder to be a teenager today, when compared to 20 years ago, this study from the Pew Research Center found broad levels of cross-generational agreement. Based on a survey of more than 1,400 people, researchers found that 69% of parents and 44% of teenagers believe that the teenage years are harder today than they were in the 2000s. (In contrast, only 15% of parents think it is easier today, and 12% of teens.) Pew’s interactive piece exploring the results also details the respondents’ reasons as to why life has gotten harder, or easier: for those in the “harder” camp, whether parents or children, social media networks appear among the main villains. “They can’t escape social pressures and are constantly bombarded by images and content that makes them feel insecure,” one father told Pew. Young people also said they faced greater pressures and expectations than those faced by previous generations.

Investigating Violence During Nigeria’s 2023 Elections

Image: Screenshot, Veza News

The run-up to Nigeria’s presidential election last year saw hundreds of violent incidents take place across the country, including a number of politically-related murders. While the Nigerian government’s Independent National Electoral Commission claimed that the vote was not marred by intimidation, a 10-month-long investigation into the elections by the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) found more than 2,000 locations where votes were not counted due to violence and irregularities — considerably more than those tallied by election officials. The investigation, which was published in Veza News, saw 20 journalists review thousands of government documents and conduct dozens of interviews, finding “widespread incidents of brutality around the country,” including 100 people killed in election-related violence, according to reports by independent observers cited in the piece.

Inaccesible Paris

Le Monde found only 3.2% of the city’s metro stations were accessible, compared to 29% of those in London and 98% of those in Tokyo. Image: Screenshot, Le Monde

The Paralympics, which began in Paris August 28 and will run until Sunday, has not seen the same deluge of data stories as the Olympics, which came before. But Le Monde has produced a number of articles about the event, including this analysis of how inequality and discrimination against people with disabilities persist in the host nation, France. Reporters found that there are issues not only in terms of accessibility to transport but in all spheres of society, such as work and education. On transport, one count cited in the report found only 3.2% of Paris metro stations to be accessible, a situation the reporters called “catastrophic,” particularly when compared to the figure of 98% in Tokyo, and one in three in London. The report also points out how the situation is improving only slowly, despite numerous laws and promises.

Unveiling an Election Bot Network in Bangladesh

Image: Screenshot, Disimlab

It’s been a turbulent year in Bangladeshi politics. In August, the country’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was forced to flee the country after a mass uprising, just months after the country had held a general election. The online fact-checking and media research platform Dismislab — which dug into political comments made online related to the poll — found “a coordinated political bot network” operating on Facebook. Its investigation uncovered more than 1,300 Facebook accounts responsible for more than 21,000 coordinated comments in favor of the then-ruling party. The report provides an overview of the bot accounts, the narratives and targets shared between them, and reveals common characteristics across the profiles. Key giveaways were that the account was created just before the election, used a profile picture that was shared across various accounts, and accounts had few connections or “friends.” An English version of the story is also available.

Japan’s ‘Global Gas Empire’

Image: Screenshot, Bloomberg

Japan, a country with few natural gas reserves of its own, has embedded itself in every link in the fuel supply chain, according to this piece from Bloomberg, which dates the country’s enthusiasm for liquified natural gas (LNG) back to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster. Maps illustrate the routes taken by Japanese tankers — the country has the largest fleet of LNG tankers in the world — while reporters detail how the Japanese government offers help to countries seeking to replace old coal-fired power plants with gas, providing technology and parts. But environmentalists warn about the long-term consequences of using natural gas, and that some satellite observations suggest that the industry generates much more methane than previously reported. Also available in Japanese.

Bonus: Women in Political Leadership Around the World

Image: Screenshot, The Washington Post

With the world watching the Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump race careering towards its November finale – an election that could see the United States elect its first woman president – the Washington Post has created a tool that shows readers how many countries have had women as heads of state or government in their lifetime. Those born in 1990, for example, will learn that 16 countries had already had a female president or prime minister at the time of their birth. Anyone aged 65, however, was born into a world that had never seen a woman take on either those roles. The Post also charts the countries that have had the most women leaders, including San Marino (20), Peru (8), and Switzerland (6), and those who have seen just one, like Brazil and Germany.

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.