• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Health

New AI tool tracks evolution of COVID-19 conspiracy theories on social media

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
April 19, 2021
in Health
Reading Time: 4 mins read
0
IMAGE
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

Algorithm developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers could help public health officials combat misinformation

IMAGE

Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., April 19, 2021–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.”

The study, titled “Thought I’d Share First,” used publicly available, anonymized Twitter data to characterize four COVID-19 conspiracy theory themes and provide context for each through the first five months of the pandemic. The four themes the study examined were that 5G cell towers spread the virus; that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation engineered or has otherwise malicious intent related to COVID-19; that the virus was bioengineered or was developed in a laboratory; and that the COVID-19 vaccines, which were then all still in development, would be dangerous.

“We began with a dataset of approximately 1.8 million tweets that contained COVID-19 keywords or were from health-related Twitter accounts,” said Dax Gerts, a computer scientist also in Los Alamos’ Information Systems and Modeling Group and the study’s co-author. “From this body of data, we identified subsets that matched the four conspiracy theories using pattern filtering, and hand labeled several hundred tweets in each conspiracy theory category to construct training sets.”

Using the data collected for each of the four theories, the team built random forest machine-learning, or artificial intelligence (AI), models that categorized tweets as COVID-19 misinformation or not.

“This allowed us to observe the way individuals talk about these conspiracy theories on social media, and observe changes over time,” said Gerts.

The study showed that misinformation tweets contain more negative sentiment when compared to factual tweets and that conspiracy theories evolve over time, incorporating details from unrelated conspiracy theories as well as real-world events.

For example, Bill Gates participated in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” in March 2020, which highlighted Gates-funded research to develop injectable invisible ink that could be used to record vaccinations. Immediately after, there was an increase in the prominence of words associated with vaccine-averse conspiracy theories suggesting the COVID-19 vaccine would secretly microchip individuals for population control.

Furthermore, the study found that a supervised learning technique could be used to automatically identify conspiracy theories, and that an unsupervised learning approach (dynamic topic modeling) could be used to explore changes in word importance among topics within each theory.

“It’s important for public health officials to know how conspiracy theories are evolving and gaining traction over time,” said Shelley. “If not, they run the risk of inadvertently publicizing conspiracy theories that might otherwise ‘die on the vine.’ So, knowing how conspiracy theories are changing and perhaps incorporating other theories or real-world events is important when strategizing how to counter them with factual public information campaigns.”

###

Link to video: Interview with Ashlynn Daughton, an information scientist in the Information Systems and Modeling Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and co-author of the study: https://youtu.be/AssdxCBdb-k

Paper: Gerts D, Shelley C, Parikh N, Pitts T, Watson Ross C, Fairchild G, Vaquera Chavez N, Daughton A. “Thought I’d Share First” and Other Conspiracy Theory Tweets from the COVID-19 Infodemic: Exploratory Study. JMIR Public Health Surveill 2021;7(4):e26527

URL: https://publichealth.jmir.org/2021/4/e26527

DOI: 10.2196/26527

Funding: Los Alamos Laboratory Directed Research and Development fund and National Laboratory Fees Research

About Los Alamos National Laboratory (http://www.lanl.gov)

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is managed by Triad, a public service oriented, national security science organization equally owned by its three founding members: Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS), and the Regents of the University of California (UC) for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.

Media Contact
Laura Mullane
[email protected]

Original Source

https://www.lanl.gov/discover/news-release-archive/2021/April/0419-ai-tool-tracks-conspiracy-theories.php

Related Journal Article

http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/26527

Tags: Audiovisual MediaBehaviorCoping/PhobiasInfectious/Emerging DiseasesInformation Management/Tracking SystemsMass MediaPersonality/AttitudePrinted MediaTechnology/Engineering/Computer ScienceVaccines
Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

Hot Springs in Bhutan: Healing Traditions and Chemistry

October 22, 2025

Vitamin A: Essential Amidst US Measles Outbreaks

October 22, 2025

ASU’s New School of Medicine Earns Preliminary Accreditation, Secures Major Gift, and Unveils New Name

October 22, 2025

Pregnancy SARS-CoV-2: Impact on Infants’ First Year

October 22, 2025
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • Sperm MicroRNAs: Crucial Mediators of Paternal Exercise Capacity Transmission

    1272 shares
    Share 508 Tweet 318
  • Stinkbug Leg Organ Hosts Symbiotic Fungi That Protect Eggs from Parasitic Wasps

    305 shares
    Share 122 Tweet 76
  • ESMO 2025: mRNA COVID Vaccines Enhance Efficacy of Cancer Immunotherapy

    142 shares
    Share 57 Tweet 36
  • New Study Suggests ALS and MS May Stem from Common Environmental Factor

    131 shares
    Share 52 Tweet 33

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Unveiling Fetal Cardiac Masses: What We Know

Hot Springs in Bhutan: Healing Traditions and Chemistry

Enhancing Maize Yield with Nitrogen in Guinea Savanna

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 66 other subscribers
  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.