New Algorithm Could Help Public Health Officials Combat Misinformation Online Written by AZoRoboticsApr 20 2021 Researchers have developed a new machine-learning program that precisely determines the COVID-19-linked conspiracy theories on social media and models how they developed with respect to time. This tool could someday assist public health officials to fight misinformation online. This image shows the change in word importance over time for tweets related to the Bill and Melinda Gates conspiracy theory. In the top panel, the x-axis represents time while the y-axis shows important words. Color represents the importance of words, with darker color indicating higher importance. In the bottom panel are word clouds for each topic. Word size corresponds to word weight (higher weighted words appear larger). Image Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory.