The fear of an unknown illness without a definitive cure creates uncertainty, leading to anxiety and increased sharing of misinformation. Thus any senseless forward of a message, meme or video can snowball the effect if in the wrong hands. This epidemic of shared misinformation, known as infodemic, has become rampant during the Covid-19 pandemic, spreading faster than the virus itself.
Off Track: A Journey inside the Bitchute Infodemic Underground is a project developed during the Final Synthesis Design Studio C3 of Communication Design MSc at Politecnico di Milano. The website analyses, through different paths, how easily users can lose themselves in this maze of misinformation in the alternative social network Bitchute, landing on content often banned from other websites. The project is addressed to the general user of the internet, digitally educated, that can still stumble, like everyone else, on misinformative content.
We focused on the data collected from Bitchute: videos and their relative hashtags. Starting from this data, we were able to design a network with the purpose to show how they are linked together on the platform. The aim of the website is to show the users how easy it is to get lost within these platforms by getting them to interact with the real network that plays the role of an archive of our research data.
Since the audience is usually not familiar with data visualization, four different thematic pages were designed to allow the user to experience the network on a different level. Each thematic page consists of a selection of videos collected from the archive and related to four apparently unbiased hashtags. These four entry points will lead the user to a series of videos filtered and ranked by us to show the different degrees and shades of content that a user can find on the platform.
→ VISIT WEBSITE ←
Originally published in January 2022
Final Synthesis Design Studio C3
Density Design
Politecnico di Milano, Communication Design MSc, 2021-2022
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