Exchanges at the Organization of American States usually don’t do well on YouTube. But when the Honduran Minister of Foreign Affairs brought up Venezuela’s crackdown on dissent last summer, Venezuelan representative Delcy Rodríguez scored surprise points with a rebuttal citing the United Nations’ 2016 Human Development Index, which ranks Venezuela 59 spots higher than Honduras. Crackdown or no crackdown, “Venezuela does not demonstrate such terrifying statistics,” she said, in an exchange that soon went viral on Spanish-speaking social media. It was a win for the Maduro regime, and the key to victory was trusted U.N. data.

For those of us working to advance human rights, such episodes are becoming frustratingly familiar. From the development initiatives of Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Gates, to Tony Blair’s despotic partnerships or Tom Friedman championing Chinese autocracy in The New York Times, the last two decades have seen political concerns repeatedly sidelined by development statistics. The classic defense of dictatorship is that without the messy constraints of free elections, free press, and free protests, autocrats can quickly tear down old cities to build efficient new ones, dam rivers to provide electricity, and lift millions out of poverty.

The problem with using statistics to sing the praises of autocracy is that collecting verifiable data inside closed societies is nearly impossible. From Ethiopia to Kazakhstan, the data that “proves” that an authoritarian regime is doing good is often produced by that very same regime.

A handful of organizations power the global industry of statistics collection, including the World Bank, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum. Each of these organizations conduct large-scale socio-economic surveys, where researchers want to include as many countries as possible. However, many of these countries—93 of them, comprising nearly 4 billion people, according to the Human Rights Foundation—are ruled by authoritarian regimes that typically block impartial investigators from entering their borders. Often, data collectors are forced to work with the strongmen in charge.

For Bahrain, the World Economic Forum receives most of its data from surveys given to government officials at the Bahrain Economic Development Board, who conduct them and give the results back to Geneva. In WEF’s analysis from that point, outliers may be cast out or excluded with data modeling, but the foundational numbers remain entirely a creation of the dictatorship.