About a month before the 2016 election, statistics guru Nate Silver posted a set of maps on Twitter using a set of poll data from his website Five Thirty Eight. One was titled, “What 2016 would look like if just women voted,” and showed a mostly blue electoral map, and the other was titled, “What 2016 would look like if just men voted,” which depicted a mostly red United States with a few blue outliers.

The maps went viral, with a total of 17,000 retweets between the two tweets, and spawned hundreds of copies, some serious, some not. There are maps examining what the election might look like if only people of color voted, or just white women, or just college-educated folks. There are meme maps that show what the map looks like if only mice voted, or if only states that form a smiley face voted. A parody of Silver’s original men’s voting map shows a toss-up between Hulk Hogan, Trump, and literal fire. Part of the country is a nuclear wasteland and part has been taken over by intelligent apes.

A new analysis of “viral maps” published in Cartography and Geographic Information Science examines the more than 500 maps that sprang from Silver’s original one, using Google’s Cloud Vision image analysis platform. The study also points out maps that were created with the pure purpose of misinforming. One egregious example, which claimed to represent an electoral map if only taxpayers voted, was simply a retitled map of something else entirely.

According to Anthony Robinson, an assistant professor of geography at Penn State University who conducted the study, maps are a particularly ripe format for spreading misinformation on the internet because we’re so used to trusting them as fact.

“Maps are graphics we trust all the time,” he says. “We use them constantly to move around the city and make decisions about where we’re going to live and find a place to eat. And we get angry when the map isn’t right. Like, ugh, this Thai place is supposed to be right here, what’s going on?”

That puts maps–particularly viral maps–on the front lines of the war on fake news. “The attributes of a map that can convince somebody that something’s real haven’t really changed, and that’s part of the problem,” he says. “My hypothesis is that when people see a map–even when it’s shared on a social media platform, and maybe they should be skeptical–they may not understand it’s being amplified in a certain direction to influence them.”

Where there’s misinformation, there’s usually bots involved. Robinson thinks that right now, maps like the one claiming to show what it might look like if only taxpayers voted are likely being disseminated and amplified using bots.