Misinformation and fake news arguably weren't as problematic for our recent Presidential election as it was back in 2016 (Trump himself lied enough on his own this time around, anyway), but the spread of false statements remains an extremely serious hurdle for modern society. Bad faith actors certainly aren't going anywhere, and worse, they will likely only get better at their work. Luckily, new technologies are emerging to help combat the spread of disinfo in the coming years, including a program that can identify malicious sites before they begin to propagate their lies... yes, a robot to help determine other robots. The new program developed by Anil Doshi at the UCL School of Management, Sharat Raghavan from the University of California, Berkley, and Cornell University's William Schmidt is detailed in their recent working paper, "Real-Time Prediction of Online False Information Purveyors and their Characteristics." In it, the team explains the tool is impressively effective at spotting domain names created purely for the purpose of spreading misinformation online: the machine learning program correctly identified 92 percent of all fake news domains as well as 96.2 percent real sites supplied to it relating to the 2016 election.

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