Wrong Protest events getting displayed due to corrupted GDELT events data

[shubham1206agra]

Variant

worldmonitor.app (Full / Geopolitical)

Affected area

Map / Globe

Bug description

We are using wrong query params for GKG 1.0 GDELT API which is causing unfiltered response, most of the entries in the response (~98%) is not related to protests. Due to this, we are seeing wrong points when we see protests events.

Same problem occurs when we try to use filters for positive events for https://happy.worldmonitor.app/.

Exact problem in query: We are using lowercase in query params when GKG 1.0 API requires uppercase for this. Also, free-text query is not allowed, we need to select a single theme provided by GDELT here. If we were using AND instead of OR, we could have use , to separate different themes.

Read about API here - https://blog.gdeltproject.org/announcing-our-first-api-gkg-geojson/

Steps to reproduce

Test 1 (https://worldmonitor.app/)

1. Open https://worldmonitor.app/.
2. Open Globe and select Protests filter.
3. Go to any country (like China), and try to select protests hotspot.
4. Click on it and go to source.

Test 2 (https://happy.worldmonitor.app/)

1. Open https://worldmonitor.app/.
2. Open Globe and select Positive Events filter.
3. See weird map which closely resembles the map on protests filter.

Expected behavior

Test 1 - It should not mark irrelevant events as protests.

Test 2 - It should mark truly positive events in the map.

Screenshots / Console errors

Screen.Recording.2026-05-21.at.3.20.37.PM.mov

Screen.Recording.2026-05-21.at.3.22.31.PM.mov

Browser & OS

All