Disinformation Spreaders Predicted by AI
Researchers at a British university have created a new algorithm that uses artificial intelligence to predict which Twitter users are going to spread disinformation before they do it.
The machine-learning algorithm was developed by a team of researchers at the University of Sheffield, led by PhD student Yida Mu and Dr. Nikos Aletras from the university’s Department of Computer Science. It can pinpoint with 79.7% accuracy which users are likely to share content from a news source deemed to be unreliable.
To create the algorithm, the researchers analyzed over 1 million publicly available tweets from approximately 6,200 Twitter aficionados. Users were then split into those who shared unreliably sourced news and those who shared reliably sourced news, and this data was used to train the algorithm.