This month, Northeastern professor Albert-László Barabási and students displayed four pieces as part of an exhibit at Harvard’s CAMLab in Cambridge.
To some, fake news may be a tweet, a Facebook post or a url on the dark web.
To Northeastern University professor Albert-László Barabási and students in the Barabási lab, fake news is hundreds of small spheres bubbling up across the walls of a darkened room, in reds, oranges, then blues and pinks, while unintelligible whispers grow louder and morph with the sound of a dripping faucet.
“It’s an animation of how (conveyors of fake news) are actually sending their messages out, and how they are effectively infecting the social network behind Twitter with their messaging,” explains Barabási, the Robert Gray Dodge professor of network science and a distinguished university professor of physics at Northeastern. “Art and the language and the medium of art offer us a way to engage with this data in a way that is different from what we normally do.”
This month, Barabási and students displayed four pieces as part of an exhibit at Harvard’s CAMLab in Cambridge. The other pieces on display in the exhibit, interestingly, were created by Kim Albrecht, a former student in Barabási’s lab who is now a professor of information design at a university in Germany.
The four immersive pieces from Barabási’s lab — visitors sat on boulder-esque (but deceptively soft) pillows on the floor of a darkened room as the animations played sequentially on the walls surrounding them — visualize data and the networks that data form in our lives.
The first three pieces visualized, respectively, the Barabási-Albert network, a model Barabási proposed in 1999 of how virtual networks grow over time; physical networks such as neural networks; and how physical networks are not connected in a straight, direct line but develop what Barabási described as “detours” as the network space becomes increasingly crowded or “hot.”
The final project, visualizing the dissemination of COVID misinformation circa 2020 via Twitter (now called X), culminated the immersive experiences.
Barabási said researchers in his lab and in Northeastern University Distinguished Professor David Lazer’s lab, which studies fake news on Twitter, focused on COVID-19 because the project — like the virus — travels across boundaries.
“If you do something on political fake news, that’s not interpretable in Europe, for instance,” Barabási says.
The research revealed 12 individuals responsible for the most fake news tweets concerning COVID.
“We call them the COVID Apostles because there happened to be exactly 12 of them,” Barabási says.
And, yes, “One of them is our health secretary,” Barabasi says.
Barabási says that making the piece immersive (it previously had been portrayed in a virtual-reality format) enabled him and his students to think about conveying not just the visual dissemination of COVID misinformation but also the feelings associated with the pandemic.
“COVID is a very uncomfortable experience,” Barabási explained.
So, the camera shakes, making it seem like the room is moving. The whispering is discomfiting as you seek familiar words. And anyone who has tried to sleep next to a dripping faucet knows how that makes you feel…
“The data is suggesting those feelings, and the question is how do you use this visual language to express that,” Barabási says. “Always the question is, how do you use these mediums to be in line with the content?”