Data Analysis

The popular app can feed young users a stream of intense, polarized and hard-to-verify videos about the Israel-Hamas war Learn more in our story here.

The app’s algorithm can send users down rabbit holes of narrow interest, resulting in potentially dangerous content such as emaciated images, purging techniques, hazardous diets and body shaming. Read the full story here.

The popular app can quickly drive young users into endless spools of adult content, including videos touting drug use and promoting pornography sites, a Wall Street Journal investigation finds. Read the full story here.

The Wall Street Journal created dozens of automated accounts that watched hundreds of thousands of videos to reveal how the social network knows you so well. Watch the video here.

A federal judge ordered the U.S. Postal Service to conduct rigorous sweeps of facilities serving states with looming election deadlines like Pennsylvania and North Carolina, so any ballots still in the system reach election officials in time. Read the full story here.

Millions of mail-in ballots haven’t been received by election offices in critical battleground states, where recent slowdowns in mail deliveries risk some votes not arriving in time to count for the presidential election. Read the full story here.

Of the 29 states that require mail-in ballots to arrive on or before election day, 28 have seen periods in recent weeks of average delivery times of more than six days, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. Read the full story here.

Sparse testing is just one reason the official tally is far too low, but the numbers will get more reliable over time. Read the full story here.

Fidelity Investments has fired or allowed more than 200 employees to resign over alleged misuse of workplace-benefits programs, according to people familiar with the matter. Read the full story here.

An analysis of 221,641 tweets shows Russian trolls tried to incite chaos, fear and outrage about fake events before their election activity, as if they were testing to see how much they could get Americans to believe. Read the full story here.

Russian Twitter accounts began heaping praise on Donald Trump and ripping his rivals earlier than previously thought–within weeks after he announced his bid for the presidency in June 2015. Read the full story here.

Republican Jeb Bush rounded up donations in the first 15 days of his presidential campaign from at least 136 top-tier donors to his brother, former President George W. Bush. Read the full story here.

The top 1% of billers of the federal program in 2013 reaped 17.5% of all payments to individual providers that year. That same cluster of doctors and other individual providers received 16.6% of the program’s payments in 2012. Read the full story here.

Powerful painkiller hydrocodone acetaminophen was the most widely prescribed drug under Medicare Part D in 2013, often by primary-care doctors. Read the full story here.

Drugs for diseases such as cancer and multiple sclerosis account for more than a quarter of spending on prescriptions for America’s elderly and disabled, data show. Read the full story here.

Christopher Veale started his career as a stockbroker at the notorious boiler room Stratton Oakmont Inc. depicted in the film “The Wolf of Wall Street.” In the 20 years since then, he has worked for 18 firms and racked up 25 red flags on his disciplinary record. Read the full story here.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority doesn’t make public all regulatory red flags it has about brokers, prompting calls for more expansive disclosure. Read the full story here.

Data from 105 of the nation’s largest police agencies showing the number of justifiable homicides by officers each year. Read the full story here.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 105 of the largest police agencies in the country found more than 550 police killings between 2007 and 2012 were missing from the FBI’s records or, in a few dozen cases, not attributed to the agency whose officers were involved. The result: It is nearly impossible to determine how many people are killed by police each year. Read the full story here.

Detailed maps and reports about the 16 stockbroker “hot spots” identified by The Journal. Read the full story here.

Journal reporters pieced together stockbroker records from 27 states detailing the disciplinary and employment histories of about 550,000, or 87%, of the country’s stockbrokers, over their careers. Many brokers were registered in multiple states. New York’s Office of the Attorney General didn’t provide 2014 data on customer complaints against brokers, so the analysis used the state’s complaints data from 2013. The other data in the analysis were compiled in the 2014 first half....

Stockbrokers who’ve been in trouble with regulators tend to cluster in certain places in the country where the affluent and elderly are easily accessible and where regulatory punishment is lax, a Wall Street Journal data analysis shows. The Journal found these hotspots in south Florida and Long Island, long known as havens for troubled brokers, but also in places around Detroit, Las Vegas and parts of California. The Journal’s analysis showed a total of 16 such hot spots....

Over the past two years, The Wall Street Journal has worked to obtain, organize and analyze data about the employment and disciplinary histories of the more than 630,000 stockbrokers in America. This paper details how that process was performed, as well as some of the reporters’ findings. Read it here.

How we built the models that showed the designated hitter likely boosts the American League’s fortunes in interleague play. Read the full story here.

Over more than 15 years of interleague baseball, the American League has had a bigger home-field advantage than the National League. A key reason may be the designated hitter. Read the full story here.

More than 2,300 providers earned $500,000 or more from Medicare in 2012 from a single procedure or service, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Read the full story here.

How we collected and analyzed the data behind our recent coverage of troubled stockbrokers. Read the full story here.

Investors made outsize bets on Allergan Inc. stock in the 10 days during which activist hedge-fund manager William Ackman was privately accumulating a stake in the Botox maker, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Read the full story here.

More than 51,500 stockbrokers failed a basic exam needed to sell securities at least once and those who repeatedly failed have on average worse disciplinary records. Read the full story here.

Some doctors who received large sums from Medicare in 2012 have had run-ins with the law, signaling how the government’s unprecedented move to make such payments public could throw up red flags for potential abuse. Read the full story here.

For a new breed of “activist” investors, tipping other investors is part of the playbook. Read the full story here.

More than 1,600 stockbrokers have bankruptcies or criminal charges in their past that weren’t reported to regulators, leaving investors in the dark, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows. Read the full story here.

Foreign airline crews saw problematic approaches to San Francisco’s airport more frequently than U.S. crews when part of an automated landing system was out of service. Read the full story here.

When corporate executives give favorable stock guidance, sell their own shares, then disclose bad news, investors sometimes grow suspicious. Read the full story here.

Study Shows Brokers’ Requests to Strike Complaints Granted in Vast Majority of Cases Read the full story here.

More than 5,000 brokers were still licensed to sell securities earlier this year after working for one or more firms that regulators expelled between 2005 and 2012, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. Read the full story here.

Short sellers are facing their worst losses in at least a decade, a Wall Street Journal analysis has found. Read the full story here.

A Wall Street Journal review of thousands of trades by insiders in their own company’s stock found the trades veering heavily toward selling rather than buying as bankruptcy filings drew nearer. We found that corporate insiders often shift from buying to selling their company’s stock as bankruptcy approaches. Our analysis suggests insiders might be privy to their company’s deteriorating conditions ahead of other investors. In the last three months before bankruptcy filings, insider stock buys dropped over 80%, while sales only slightly decreased....

Stock “pinning” is the tendency of stocks to close precisely at their nearest option strike price and is a regular feature of expiration Fridays. A Wall Street Journal examination of trading behavior from the start of 2007 through April 2013, using a list of all U.S. stocks with options from DeltaNeutral.com, gives a sense of the phenomenon’s prevalence. We analyzed trading behaviors from 2007 to April 2013 using U.S. stocks with options data....

The release of government data showing wide variation in hospital pricing removes a layer of secrecy but probably won’t make medical charges more uniform, experts said Wednesday. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released data revealing significant variations in hospital pricing for common treatments from 3,337 hospitals. The disclosed prices often don’t reflect the actual amounts paid, with numerous entities like Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers negotiating different rates. Despite the data’s transparency, experts believe it might not standardize medical charges, and its usefulness for consumers determining out-of-pocket costs is limited....

Corporate board members are increasingly using a type of opaque trading plan that was originally intended primarily for executives. The use of government-sanctioned 10b5-1 trading plans, designed to avoid insider trading suspicion by scheduling trades in advance, has surged by 55% among nonexecutive directors since 2008. Some directors use these plans for rapid large-scale stock sales. Critics argue that these trading plans may sometimes be abused, especially by board members who also run investment funds, potentially leading to the appearance of impropriety....

A WSJ investigation into asbestos trust claims and court cases of roughly 850,000 people filed since the late 1980s found many apparent anomalies. Asbestos claims continue rising by 85 per day even as asbestos usage has declined. Our analysis of claims data found anomalies like over 2,000 claimants saying they were exposed under age 12, and discrepancies between disease types reported to trusts versus courts. Trusts have reduced payout rates as assets deplete rapidly from mounting claims....

Most people assume a degree in the arts is no guarantee of riches. Now there is evidence that such graduates also rack up the most student-loan debt. Graduates from arts-focused schools accrue the highest student-loan debt, with a median debt load of $21,576, and often have starting salaries around $40,000. Our analysis of Department of Education data found that research university graduates typically have less student loan debt than those from liberal-arts colleges: $18,100 versus $19,445, respectively....

A medical-supplies company made a $43 million repurchase of its own shares last year, buoying the stock before bad news hit, even as four top managers were selling company shares. A medical-supplies firm repurchased a significant amount of its own shares, boosting the stock’s value, while four top executives sold their company shares. A month later, the stock experienced a 9% drop following the announcement of poor earnings. Some employees within the firm expressed concerns about the trading activities....

An investigation of insider trading by corporate executives found many make profitable trades prior to news announcements. Our analysis found that many executives made trades yielding considerable profits just before significant company news announcements. Of 20,237 executives we looked at, 1,418 experienced an average gain of 10% in their trades one week before significant news releases. This rate of profit was notably higher than that of executives who faced negative stock movements....

Only a fraction of homeowners in some parts of the Northeast who incurred property damage from Sandy have insurance that covers losses from floods, a Wall Street Journal analysis finds. Read the full story here.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal shows that banks’ submissions used to calculate the London interbank offered rate often are slow to change and sometimes fail to track the market’s view of the credit risk posed by each firm. We found that banks’ submissions used to determine the London interbank offered rate (Libor) frequently remain static and often don’t align with the market’s perception of each firm’s credit risk, leading to questions about Libor’s credibility....

The Labor Department has revised upward its first estimate of seasonally adjusted claims the following week in 57 of the past 58 reports, a Dow Jones analysis found Read the full story here.

At a time when the overall U.S. homicide rate is declining, more civilians are killing each other and claiming self-defense–a trend that is most pronounced in states with new “stand your ground” laws. The U.S. has seen a notable increase in justifiable homicides, particularly in states with “stand your ground” laws, even as the overall homicide rate declines. “Stand your ground” laws allow individuals greater latitude in using force for self-defense outside the home....

The U.S. job market’s recent improvement has some economists wondering if 2012 will break from last year’s pattern of strong job growth in the winter followed by a slowing in the spring and summer. Read the full story here.

Results from Russia’s parliamentary vote earlier this month are studded with red flags that suggest broad electoral fraud, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Our analysis of nearly 100,000 voting precincts reveals potential vote-rigging, with up to 14 million votes in question. Higher turnout areas showed suspiciously strong support for Putin’s United Russia party. Large-scale protests have erupted in response to allegations of fraud, challenging Putin’s political legitimacy. In response, Putin promises transparent measures for upcoming elections....

Smaller U.S. banks and savings institutions are cutting jobs in a sign of a deepening financial-industry retrenchment that is shaking firms from Main Street to Wall Street. Read the full story here.

When disgraced hedge-fund titan Raj Rajaratnam is sentenced in federal court Thursday, he will come up against a hard and unavoidable truth: Inside traders are facing considerably harsher sentences than they did in the past. Read the full story here.

Despite a decade of technological advances that make it possible to work almost anywhere, many of the nation’s most educated people continue to cluster in a handful of dominant metropolitan areas such as Boston, New York and California’s Silicon Valley, according to census data released Thursday. Read the full story here.