Beth Sarim:
Actually I think it could be called....""massaging the numbers"".
Indeed. It seems they don’t understand that presenting a growth rate where there is no previous value would actually be an invalid division by zero and so growth should be left blank or otherwise similarly noted for new entries. (And Monaco apparently wasn’t counted as one of the 33 ‘other countries’ before, which hasn’t changed.)
Their growth rate percentages are usually accurate, and demonstrably based on the average publisher figures and not the peak (which is less reliable and can count some members twice). But in their public FAQ page about how many JWs there are, they promote the peak figure instead.