You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
8 years old
The 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg made headlines for her speech at the UN Climate Summit, but she is also among a group of children and teens, who are now being overwhelmed with online abuse for their climate activism. Tactics include being swarmed with pornography, racist messages, creepy direct messages, barrages of insults, doxing, and death threats. Havana Chapman-Edwards, who is 8-years-old and black, was even contacted by someone her family later discovered was a registered sex offender. [BuzzFeed News]
4,921 sponsored ads from hate groups
A new report says Facebook, the social media website associated with massive amounts of misinformation as much as with baby pictures from your college friends, has made $1.6 million from 4,921 sponsored advertisements from 38 different hate groups and individuals identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center since May 2018. Between May of last year and September 17, 2019, anti-immigrant groups spent $958,988 on Facebook advertisements, and anti-LGBTQ groups spent $541,977. The three largest groups behind the targeted ad spending were the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Family Research Council.[Sludge]
11 percent
Data analysis from art market information company Artnet shows that only 11 percent of the art acquired by 26 top museums in the United States in the last decade were works by women. Between 2008 and 2018, only 29,247 works by female artists were acquired by institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, out of 260,470 total works. The data also showed the peak number of acquisitions by female artists occurred in 2009, with 3,462, and the gender percentage was “relatively stagnant” over the last 10 years. [New York Times]
5.6-magnitude
An earthquake in northern Pakistan has killed at least 22 people, and injured more than 700. The epicentre of the 5.6-magnitude earthquake that struck on Tuesday afternoon was near the city of Mirpur, where several houses, roads and buildings were damaged. In October 2005, the same region was hit with magnitude 7.6 earthquake that killed more than 75,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. [New York Times]
$343 million
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says the state has distributed half of a $343 million federal grant for members of the citrus industry which suffered damage from Hurricane Irma in September 2017. Growers posted 75-year production lows after the hurricane, and the Florida-specific grant was part of a larger $2.36 billion disaster relief package approved by Congress, but DeSantis said the state had only paid out less than $500,000 when he took office. A study from the Florida Department of Citrus and the University of Florida found the industry supports approximately 50,000 jobs and has a $7.2 billion economic impact. [Orlando Sentinel]
1,009 American CEOs
The CEOs of eBay, Juul, and WeWork have all stepped down this week, but data from business and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas show a record-pace of executive edits among U.S. companies, with 159 CEO changes in August and 1,009 departures for the first eight months of this year. Other companies that saw turnover of their chief executives this month are Comscore, Volkswagen, and Nissan. Experts and analysts says increased accountability from corporate boards, concerns over a economic downturn, as well as the age of baby boomer executives are all factors for this trend. [CNBC]