The new, searchable database FBarchive is designed to help researchers, journalists, and policymakers better understand and investigate decisions made at Meta about some of the most influential social media platforms across the globe.
Investigative journalists intending to cover social media and its societial effects must understand the intricacies of the companies that drive them, and think critically about novel angles of coverage.
A panel at the 2023 International Journalism Festival in Perugia explored the implications for journalism of Twitter “dying” and Facebook’s pivot away from news.
Social media platforms are among the most difficult sites to scrape for data across the internet. A recent session at NICAR23 unveiled several dynamic new tools — including Junkipedia, a possible CrowdTangle replacement — that can perform a wealth of social media monitoring tasks, from tracking down who is behind harmful ads to identifying conspiracy groups or influencers spreading disinformation.
GIJN’s Hindi editor offers his picks for the best investigative journalism stories from India during 2022.
This week, our DDJ Top 10 looks at The Marshall Project’s analysis of child detention at the US border, the Baltimore Banner’s in-depth story on the city’s vacant housing crisis. Plus, we dive into stories using historical data to investigate how slavery broke apart families, a flight analysis on the new destinations of the Russian elite, and a look at Facebook’s “broken promises.”
Many of the lawmakers who made up the historical ranks of the United States Congress had a personal relationship with slavery with more than 1,700 being slaveowners, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Our weekly NodeXL curation of the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter also features a visualization of the size of the Tonga eruption, an analysis of how Twitter is being used ahead of a high-stakes election in the Philippines, and a critique of some of the maps used to illustrate the situation on the Russia-Ukraine border amid fears of a military incursion.
In this excerpt from Anya Schiffrin’s latest report on the state of sustainability of journalism, the author discusses how government funding can throw the profession a lifeline in an era where philanthropic efforts to support the press are struggling and Big Tech is increasingly seen as a competitor instead of a platform for news organizations.
Open source reporting expert Henk van Ess has dozens of tricks to find elusive social media information through indirect means, as well as a search app he created. In a recent GIJN webinar on “Investigating Social Media,” Van Ess shared several of these tips.
In a recent GIJN webinar, open source reporting expert Henk van Ess shared several online search tricks. But he explains that these work-arounds are merely tools for a new approach to online research that he calls “thinking visual,” which invites reporters to think of keywords like a search engine, rather than a person.
