MisVis: Explaining Web Misinformation Connections via Visual Summary

Abstract

Identifying and raising awareness about web misinformation is crucial as the Internet has become a major source of information for many people. We introduce MisVis, a web-based interactive tool that helps users better assess misinformation websites and understand their connections with other misinformation sites through visual explanations. Different from the existing techniques that primarily only focus on alerting users of misinformation, MisVis provides new ways to visualize how the site is involved in spreading information on the web and social media. Through MisVis, we contribute novel interactive visual design: Summary View helps users understand a site’s overall reliability by showing the distributions of its linked websites; Graph View presents users with the connection details of how a site is linked to other misinformation websites. In collaboration with researchers at a large security company, we are working to deploy MisVis as a web browser extension for broader impact.