Why has sharing misleading information has become such a huge
problem to the point that social platforms had to take drastic
action against it?
The World Health Organisation defines 'infodemic' as the
dissemination of false or misleading information in digital and
physical environments during a disease outbreak. When users share
this type of content, it can confuse and induce health-damaging
behaviour. It also leads to distrust of health authorities and
undermines the public health response. An infodemic can intensify or
lengthen epidemics when people are unsure of what they need to do to
protect their health and the health of those around them.
With an increasingly connected and digital population information
spreads faster and faster. Social Media has become the primary
source of information and communication for million of users,
especially during a crisis, regardless of the authenticity of the
sources. This can help to more quickly fill information voids but
can also amplify harmful messages.
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” has become rampant during the Covid-19
pandemic, spreading faster than the virus itself.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.610623/full
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/speech_20_1000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infodemic
https://www.who.int/health-topics/infodemic#tab=tab_1
A JOURNEY INSIDE THE BITCHUTE INFODEMIC UNDERGROUND
“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. 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. What happens next?
The project is an extension of the previous report
'Among the plandemic truthers. A data journey through the
infodemic conspiracists underground', a study about how content related to Covid-19, from
misinformation to outright conspiracy theories, is communicated on
dark platforms. 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:
#MASKS, #VACCINE, #VIRUS, #PCR.
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.
We ordered the videos on the page starting from the general
misinformation ones to the ones that prompt the users to go and
take actions or film themselves doing so.
Example of
misinformative video
Example of
conspiratorial video
Example of
subversive/harmful video
The pages will act as proxies of the archive that will be accessible at the end of each page. We made the decision not to redirect the user to the Bitchute website at any point inside our project in order to prevent the spreading of the content apart from the usage of it that has been done by research itself.
The network represents the core part of our website and it plays the role of the archive. The purpose of the archive is to allow the user to explore our entire dataset and see for themselves how the videos and hashtags are connected. Through the archive, it is possible for the user to dive deep into the network, starting with a single hashtag and looking where it leads you. From these actions the user can experience the phenomenon of converging conspiracy theories: an overlapping of completely different Covid-19 related topics that meet and merge, visible in the complexity of the network.
The network was designed starting from the data collected on Bitchute. Searching for “plandemic” and “scamdemic” on the platform a total of 1500 videos per word were selected and for each video were collected all the relative hashtags. Then the double entries were removed and all the hashtags with less than 5 occurrences were deleted and therefore also the relative videos. In the end, the network was generated with a total of 2381 videos and 127 hashtags, spanning from 23/02/2020 to 22/10/2021.
Each video is connected to its relative hashtags and the position within the network depends on which hashtags a video is linked to. The hashtags are represented by circular dots whose size increases and changes according to the number of occurrences. The videos are represented by squared dots and each one of them appears only once.
The user is free to explore the network by moving around, zooming and clicking on a specific hashtag. By doing that, all the nearest connections are highlighted. The relative hashtags to the videos are also shown, giving the user a more complete look at each cluster. By hovering on a single hashtag, only its nearest neighbors (videos) are highlighted in red.
When selecting a hashtag, the user can explore the videos and click on them to see a preview on the left side of the page with the title and the number of hashtags of it.
Alternatively, the user can also type into the search bar on the top left of the page and look for a specific hashtag from there, seeing also suggestions based on what he is currently typing.
Andrea De Simone
Davide Chiappini
Emanuele Ghebaur
Francesca Gheli
Hanlu Ma
Mattia Casarotto
Raffaele Riccardelli
Click me :^)