.OFF TRACK

  • Web designer
  • M. Casarotto, D. Chiappini, A. De Simone, E. Ghebaur, F. Gheli, H. Ma
“Off Track: in 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.