For Shannon Mattern’s spring 2021 graduate studio Mapping the Field, I created a collection of five different maps related to misinformation and online radicalization in anti-democratic spaces.

The Anti-Democracy Atlas uses five different methods to examine these topics: relational, organizational, geographic, visual, and temporal. On the whole, the atlas is an attempt to broadly map the different ways that powerful people use information—real or manipulated—to influence less powerful people and slowly chip away at democratic institutions.

Visit the full website here.

For my graduate thesis work, I embarked on an investigation on online disinformation because I want to help curb its spread and decrease radicalization. Over the course of my thesis year, I spent months researching the complexities of the topic and learning from issue experts in academia and journalism. I’ve also tried to wrap my head around potential interventions from a variety of angles.

This culminated in Battle for Your Brain, an editorial piece that summarizes my findings on the internet architecture that drives misinformation and proposes a set of actions to address the issue.

Below is a collection of some of my data experiments, visualizations, UX prototypes, and writeups on the topic.

Using Facebook’s Top 10, a Twitter account from a New York Times journalist who tracks where the Facebook posts with the most engagement are coming from, I tracked the political leanings of over 50 popular Facebook pages from July 2020 to March 2021.

You can view the full visualization here.

As finalists for the NYC Media Lab & Consumer Reports Data Privacy Challenge, my team Data Ctrl created a website and chatbot prototype to provide users with holistic information on the ramifications of their data agreements.

I was responsible for the content side of this project, conducting user research, categorizing information, and writing copy.

Created in collaboration with Sohee Cho, Bhavya Gupta, Jason Li, and Rosa Ng

We don’t know exactly how Facebook knows exactly what ads to show us—because they won’t tell us. But I wanted to know if I could make connections between my actual online behavior and what Facebook thinks my online behavior is by using the data Facebook does make available.

You can view the full visualization here.