On the other hand, data journalism has become more contested. The 2013 Snowden leaks helped to publicly confirm a transnational surveillance apparatus of states and technology companies as a matter of fact rather than speculation. These leaks suggested how citizens were made knowable through big data practices, showing a darker side to familiar data-making devices, apps and platforms (Gray & Bounegru, 2019). In the United States the launch of Nate Silver’s dedicated data journalism outlet FiveThirtyEight in 2014 was greeted by a backlash for its overconfidence in particular kinds of quantitative methods and its disdain for “opinion journalism” (Byers, 2014). While Silver was acclaimed as “lord and god of the algorithm” by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart for successfully predicting the outcome of the 2012 elections, the statistical methods that he advocated were further critiqued and challenged after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. These elections along with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the rise of populist right-wing leaders around the world, were said to correspond with a “post-truth” moment (Davies, 2016), characterized by a widespread loss of faith in public institutions, expert knowledge, and the mediation of public and political life by online platforms which left their users vulnerable to targeting, manipulation and misinformation.