A museum of chart crimes, minus the lecture.

Charts are the most trusted liars on the internet. A sentence that stretched the truth this hard would get community-noted in minutes — put the same stretch on a y-axis and it sails into presentations, newscasts, and group chats unchallenged, because a chart looks like math.

This site collects real charts that mislead, hangs each one on the wall, and attaches a plain-English exhibit label: what the chart wants you to believe, the specific trick it uses, and what the honest version of the same data looks like. Learn a few of the 15 techniques and you'll start spotting them everywhere. We apologize in advance for your ruined news-watching experience.

Most misleading charts aren't propaganda. They're a spreadsheet default nobody questioned, a deadline, a designer told to “make it pop,” or a genuinely hard visualization problem handled badly at 6 p.m. on a Friday. Appearing in this gallery is not an accusation of bad faith — it's an anatomy lesson.

The goal isn't to make you cynical about data. It's the opposite: charts are wonderful, which is exactly why the broken ones are worth studying.

Every chart in the gallery gets the same treatment:

• The claim — what the chart wants you to walk away believing.
• The trick — the specific technique doing the work, tagged and linked to the field guide.
• The honest version — what the same data says when drawn straight, with a redrawn chart where we have one.

Charts are exhibited for commentary, criticism, and education. We credit and link the original source wherever possible, show charts at the size needed to understand the technique, and happily correct attributions. If you made a chart shown here and believe we got the context wrong, we want to know.

Soon. A proper submissions inbox is on the way — the internet produces chart crimes far faster than any one curator can frame them. Until then, keep your screenshots.