Off Track in the Infodemic Underground” is a project developed during the Final Synthesis Design Studio C3 of Communication Design MSc at Politecnico di Milano. It is a recorded journey of investigation in which we analyzed, through different paths, how easily the users can lose themselves in the maze of misinformation, 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.
For this website, 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.