How data is presented can affect how people understand it. Misleading visualizations might be accidents but sometimes it can be intentional manipulation to deceive viewers.
To understand the way to visualize data in different forms check out this site that shows 25 different ways to visual one dataset.
This article, Land Doesn't Vote People Do, is a great example of how a visualization can distort numbers and our understanding.
Reddit's Data is Ugly
5 Ways Writers Use Misleading Graphs To Manipulate You
