Member-only story
I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while now but I keep on seeing more and more examples of confusing charts, and unfortunately, I believe that many people are not data literate enough to know that something is wrong. Recently, I have been mindlessly scrolling through Reddit and came across the data is ugly subreddit — it is quite entertaining and some examples are really terrible, so it’s a good source for an aspiring data analyst to learn from someone else’s mistakes. But what really hit me was the fact that many of those examples are actually from media — sources that people believe to be reliable. However, some data has been misrepresented so badly that it sparks a question of whether it was just some inexperienced intern being in charge of designing the graphs or maybe the truth is being misrepresented on purpose.
The first example is badly designed but not dangerous for a reader — even if someone thinks that 29 medals for the United States are somehow more important than 34 for China, it won’t really affect elections or public perception regarding some important policy. But let’s take a look at other graphs that can influence someone’s perception of how many people support a particular candidate:
Those graphs have been presented by a German and a Portuguese TV station — do you think people would notice what’s wrong with them in just the 30 seconds when the graph is showed on the screen?
When you analyze the graphs closer, it becomes obvious that 13% for the female candidate is shown as a smaller part of the donut chart than the 12% for the first candidate. Similarly, the bar corresponding to 16% is somehow higher than a bar representing 17%. Probably most people will also look at the numerical values and not jump to a conclusion only based on the visual representation of the data but it is a little bit scary to think that some might just believe what the graph is showing.
