A recent example I saw was a friend of mine on Facebook, who posted a snapshot from an MSNBC program. It was an attack on Rex Tillerson, in the form of a bar gr

A recent example I saw was a friend of mine on Facebook, who posted a snapshot from an MSNBC program. It was an attack on Rex Tillerson, in the form of a bar graph of profit potential for ExxonMobil by country. The countries seemed pretty random (that well known oil giant Germany was in there) but at the top was Russia with a bar far far larger than any other country on the chart. The graph was an obvious attempt to continue the theme of "Trump administration is owned by Russia". The problem was that the numbers next to each bar weren't labelled: the graph was totally lacking in context. I did some googling and found that the graph appeared to be measuring profit potential in millions of acres of drilling rights. Thus it was comparing an acre of frozen Arctic ocean with an acre of Germany as if they were the same thing. There are industry standard ways to compare oil fields. I've never once seen oil fields measured in this way because it ignores extraction costs, but sure, if you want to imply that Russia will be wildly more profitable than anywhere else on earth then that's one way to do it. But it's an abuse of statistics. I pointed this out to the friend in question who simply said that she had a policy of not taking part in political debates on Facebook.