Press release:
A new machine-learning program accurately identifies COVID-19-related conspiracy theories on social media and models how they evolved over time–a tool that could someday help public health officials combat misinformation online.
“A lot of machine-learning studies related to misinformation on social media focus on identifying different kinds of conspiracy theories,” said Courtney Shelley, a postdoctoral researcher in the Information Systems and Modeling Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of the study that was published last week in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. “Instead, we wanted to create a more cohesive understanding of how misinformation changes as it spreads. Because people tend to believe the first message they encounter, public health officials could someday monitor which conspiracy theories are gaining traction on social media and craft factual public information campaigns to preempt widespread acceptance of falsehoods.”
Continue reading “New AI tool tracks evolution of COVID-19 conspiracy theories on social media”