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Lies are nothing new; that much is clear. If everything we said were true, Paul McCartney would be dead by now, and humans would never have landed on the moon. Lies can be harmless, like when we avoid talking to someone with a blue folder on the street by saying “we’re in a hurry.” But falsehoods can also start wars, such as when, in 1931, the Japanese army staged attacks against itself to justify a war with China and conquer Manchuria.

If the effects can be devastating and the growth of disinformation is exponential, what can we do to protect ourselves? Do we need new tools? Can artificial intelligence help us detect and stop false information? And another question remains: does this technology have limitations?

If we want to detect a lie, the first thing we should focus on is the language it uses. Lies rely on specific language patterns. Fake news often speaks in generalities, provides minimal contextual information, and uses highly emotive words. With the help of artificial intelligence, a computer can learn to detect these traits in a text. Estela Saquete, professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Alicante, is working on a technology capable of analyzing a text and determining if it is true or false with a 75% accuracy rate. However, despite these promising results, Saquete cautions that “we may hit a ceiling with this method, as deceivers are learning to lie more effectively.”

Another technology being used in the fight against fake news is content geolocation. This technology was what saved the Samoa Bar in Orihuela, Alicante. The bar fell victim to a false news story warning customers to avoid the establishment due to a supposed case of coronavirus among the staff. A few days later, Saquete’s team discovered that the warning text circulated in Orihuela was actually about another Samoa Bar located in Galicia, which had indeed been temporarily closed. “We use a program that allows us to pinpoint where news stories were written. In this case, we saw a red dot in Galicia. This showed us that the information received in Orihuela had not been written there,” explains Saquete.

As one hole is patched, fake news finds new paths. “Some anti-vaccine tweets use the hashtag #vaccineswork to trick verification programs,” explains Hans Eguía, a primary care doctor in Denmark and a telemedicine researcher. “The problem with relying on technology to solve everything is that there will always be people who use the same technology to counterattack,” Eguía notes.

Hans Eguía’s approach isn’t just about combatting false information; he also believes that doctors should be equipped with tools to help them identify it. The HOPE program (Health Operation for Personalized Evidence), which Eguía helped develop, scans doctors’ notes on patients and searches for reliable related information across scientific journals. The app has already begun testing, and the results, according to Eguía, are quite promising: “Doctors received a list of ten articles related to their patient in just twelve seconds.”

Despite technological advances, both Eguía and Saquete emphasize a shared goal: empowering people to recognize and stop spreading lies. “Fake news have always existed,” says Saquete, “the problem now is that it goes viral, and once it’s been shared so widely, it’s impossible to debunk.” Saquete points out the challenges they face in delivering corrections to those affected: “Everyone shares the fake news; no one shares the debunk.”

But while lies once spread by letter or radio, today they’ve found a much richer breeding ground: social media. And if that alone weren’t enough, a global pandemic has only fueled the “perfect storm” of misinformation and fake news. “We couldn’t imagine how much falsehoods would multiply during the pandemic,” says Carlos Mateos, coordinator of the Instituto SaludsinBulos, in his opening speech at the Second Health Misinformation Congress. The congress, in just its second year, has set itself the challenge of countering health-related lies. But as Mateos explains, this task is becoming ever more complex: “Fake news creators are getting stronger, and now they have bots capable of toppling governments.”

The perception that fake news is spreading more rapidly has been confirmed by the Second Study on Health Misinformation. Among more than 300 doctors surveyed, 90% report that the pandemic has increased the amount of misinformation in circulation. Healthcare professionals have seen this growth firsthand: three out of four doctors have attended to patients troubled by false information about COVID-19. The primary channels for spreading these falsehoods are WhatsApp and social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

As disinformation continues to grow, more tools are needed to combat it. Artificial intelligence can be one of these tools. Big data and machine learning are powerful technologies, but they are also available to anti-vaccine advocates, and thus are not a definitive solution. Now more than ever, fake news hunters emphasize the importance of doctors and citizens learning to critically assess what they read and stop relying on the opinion of the worst doctor of all: Dr. Google.