00:00What's going on, everybody?
00:01Welcome back to another video.
00:02In this series, I show you how easy it is
00:04to manipulate and lie with data.
00:12Since I've been working in data analytics,
00:14when I watch the news and I see different graphs and charts,
00:16my kind of spidey senses start tingling
00:19and they're like, something is wrong with that graph
00:21or with that data.
00:22Like I'm really curious as to how they got that.
00:25And so I'm gonna be showing you in several different ways
00:27throughout this series,
00:28how you can easily mislead and lie to people using data.
00:32With that being said,
00:32let's see how we can change the axes on our graphs
00:35to make them a little bit more misleading.
00:37All right, so let's take a look at
00:38what we're actually looking at.
00:40Here we have this chart.
00:42And as you can see, just visually on this chart,
00:45it looks like we've had some dramatic increase in sales.
00:49I mean, from 2014 to, I guess it's 2024 to 2015,
00:55we have some really dramatic sales
00:57going higher and higher and higher.
00:59And whoever we have for our data viz guy,
01:03he's just killing it.
01:04No, that's not accurate.
01:06Let's take a look at our data on the right hand side.
01:09So in 2015, that's when our data starts.
01:11It's at 500.
01:12And then it goes down year by year, steadily increasing
01:16until we get to 2024 at 640.
01:19Now we don't know this unit of measurement.
01:21It doesn't really matter for this example.
01:23I have seen charts exactly like this.
01:26And I am not joking you on the news.
01:28And when I'm looking at it on the news,
01:30I'll tell my wife, I'm like, babe, this is not accurate.
01:34You can't show data like this.
01:36It's very misleading.
01:37It's very misleading.
01:38Now, is it incorrect?
01:40No, but it is manipulative because they're trying to elicit a certain response.
01:45And so when you see this, your first response is, wow, sales have really been increasing.
01:50Now, let's take a look at this axis right here.
01:53We have our x-axis.
01:54We have our y-axis.
01:55Our x-axis is perfectly fine.
01:56It's just the year.
01:57But for our sales volume, our y-axis is very misleading because we're starting just below
02:04the lowest amount back in 2015.
02:07That's where we're starting, and that's actually not a very good place to start because what
02:12you're doing is you're putting basically the minimum and the maximum as your y-axis, and
02:17it can dramatically shape how this data is viewed.
02:19Now, what I'm going to do is we're going to come over here to this misleading graph,
02:22good.
02:23This one's the misleading graph, bad, okay?
02:25We don't want to do this.
02:27And if you see this, be very wary, right?
02:30Let's go over here to the misleading graph, good.
02:33Now, we have zero all the way up to 700.
02:37Now, we could make the case for, you know, 650 or even 200.
02:42If we wanted to go in and change it, we could do that.
02:44But this is much more accurate.
02:47It hasn't been as giant of an increase as this one right here.
02:52We're showing the same data, just in a different way.
02:55And so it can be very misleading and be very manipulative if you select y-axis that don't
03:02really represent the data that well.
03:03And we can come in here.
03:04I'm going to right click.
03:05I'm actually, I'm going to click on this.
03:07I'm going to right click.
03:08And there we go.
03:09I'm going to go to format axes.
03:11And so we have zero and 700 right here.
03:14We could even change this.
03:16So let's, let's get crazy.
03:17Let's do 250 and 650.
03:20I think this is not perfect, but you know, we're just pushing it in just a little.
03:26I actually think the 700 looked a little better.
03:28You can see that even this looks a lot more accurate.
03:32And you know, you need to be aware of these y-axis.
03:35They can't, and the x-axis depending on which one is kind of representing which variable.
03:39But this is a very, very, very common way that I have seen people mess up data, mess
03:44up charts and graphs.
03:46And genuinely, I think in some instances, they're trying to mislead and show a bigger
03:51amount of sales.
03:52Maybe they want the stock price to go up.
03:54And so they're like, look at these sales.
03:55Look how massive they are.
03:57But if you dig into it, if you actually went back and looked at the data, it's not that
04:01big of increase.
04:02I mean, we're not increasing by even like 10%.
04:04I mean, from this year to this year, it's like a 2% increase and it keeps going.
04:09It's very, very small increments.
04:11We're not talking like 10, 15% over here.
04:13And so I've seen this in the real world a hundred times.
04:16And I've seen people give presentations on this.
04:19And then when I ask, oh, hey, you know, why is it like this?
04:22They'll try to explain it to me.
04:24And I'm like, well, you know, you're not wrong.
04:26You are representing the data.
04:28You're just doing it.
04:29And it's a bit misleading.
04:30Like when I'm looking at this, I think we have some massive change in whatever thing
04:33we're looking at, but it's actually kind of a small change.
04:36And so this is one of the easiest and probably one of the most common types of manipulation and
04:41lies with data that you will see, especially on the news.
04:45I'm not trying to dog the news over here.
04:46I've just seen this in the news a hundred times, and I know how prevalent it is.
04:51Knowing this year is going to cover a ton of different scenarios where people can lie
04:55and mislead you and manipulate you with data.
04:57But I hope that this is helpful.
04:58I hope that you're going to learn from this and you will also take this and not make the
05:01same mistake with your data when you're presenting this to your boss or a client that you're
05:06really thinking about these things.
05:07So if you found this helpful, be sure to like and subscribe below and I will see you in the
05:13next video.
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