Designers and communicators are using data visualization to arugue their desirable yet deceptive messages to the audience. I found the manipulation of the axis scale & orientation most deceptive. These deceptive graphs violate my perception of how the Y-axis should work. When the Y-axis does not start at 0 or when it shows inverted data, the audience could easily read the charts incorrectly. Even though the facts are not distorted in the graphs, the messages are exaggerated. For example, the axis-free histogram below shows a large knuckleball velocity gap between 2012 and 2013, yet the actual difference is just 2mph. blog-misleading-baseball-graph.avif

Meanwhile, it is interesting to get to know that among all message exaggeration/understatement techniques, the line chart is the one with the biggest effect, followed by the bars and then bubble, suggesting that these type of charts may have a more pronounced effect (Pandey et al, 2015). This finding reminds us to be extra careful when interpreting graphs created by others, especially the line charts.