Also worth noting that the X axis is growing by orders of magnitude and not linearly.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Ironically, the misleadingly biased visualization makes this tantamount to fake news.
It's not even close to fake news. Logarithmic scales are standard in this kind of visualization. The thrust of the result is that right-wing people share more fake news, and if you look at the graph, this is clear. If you mistake the X-axis as a linear scale, the result makes the effect less pronounced, not more.
So if anything, the graph undersells the thesis in the name of creating a more compact and readable visualization. There is no deception here.
If you mistake the X-axis as a linear scale, the result makes the effect less pronounced, not more.
Exactly, and that's the problem! When the chart makes it look like the right "only" shares maybe twice as much fake news when it's actually 10x-100x more, it makes the right look way less bad than it actually is.