throwawayfb69 | 5 years ago | on: Truncating Bar Graphs Persistently Misleads Viewers
throwawayfb69's comments
throwawayfb69 | 5 years ago | on: Facebook reported fake numbers to advertisers
I was less immediately bothered about the fake accounts ('like'-and-run at least is ignorable and does me no significant harm, even if it harms my belief in FB's authenticity and harms FB's reputation with me).
But, I was extremely bothered about apparently real people contacting me who were well outside the demographic of people that I was paying for. I spent time dealing with them, and - as expected - they were unlikely to convert into customers.
I would have re-employed FB 10 times over if I didn't actively have to deal with so many contacts outside of what I was paying for.
throwawayfb69 | 5 years ago | on: Facebook reported fake numbers to advertisers
I have previously got a decent ROI from Facebook ads, but it was also very evident that they were not providing the service that they claimed. Whenever I ran specific locally targeted ads, large numbers of apparently fake accounts from around the world would like my business page: representing a significant percentage of the clicks that Facebook was claiming.
Clearly, FB was reaching some relevant users, since I picked some up as customers, but this was ridiculously padded with users outside the demographic that I was paying for, and I had to again figure out whether people were potential customers (re-qualify them). This left a sour taste and, as a result, I will not use Facebook advertising again.
I'm not sure why it's in Facebook's interest to lie like this.
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The examples show Fox News-levels of graph manipulation, i.e. maximum manipulation.
This is clearly done in an attempt to communicate a particular message. If you read the questions as "What message was the author trying to communicate?", which is reasonable, then the study could show that you were willing to repeat back the author's intended message.
In this sense, you weren't fooled by the graph - you understood exactly the message it was intended to convey.
A truncated graph is, in my opinion, completely appropriate for data where the relative differences or trends in data points is more relevant to the message than the absolute values - a temperature chart, say (where the absolute values are pretty much meaningless).
If you took data of a clearly relative type rather than a clearly absolute type, would you be able to say that viewers were misled in the exact opposite direction? That would be interesting.