In this work now published in Information, Communication & Society, we explored how social media is used to amplify moral conservative advocacy in the digital space. In the paper “Mainstreaming and Transnationalization of Anti-Gender Ideas through Social Media: The Case of CitizenGO”, along with an international group of talented young researchers, we examine how major […]
First publication of 2025 on a highly unique case: a coordinated attack by pro-Vietnam activists on a post from the Facebook page of the Chinese Embassy in Italy. The post, which is still accessible (link), incidentally featured a map that included the Spratly and Paracel Islands—disputed by Vietnam—as part of Chinese territory. Some of the
The paper Rethinking Veganism in the Digital Age. Innovating Methodology and Typology to Explore a Decade of Facebook Discourses is now published on Sociological Research Online, a journal of the British Sociological Association. The paper can be read on the journal website or, if you don’t have access, you can access and download the accepted
I quickly checked the impact of the Facebook MisinformationPolicy (announced on March 7, 2019) on the endorsements of vaccine-related posts by Italian misinformation actors, employing interrupted time series analysis (you can read about this technique in the didactic material I have made available online at https://nicolarighetti.github.io/Time-Series-Analysis-With-R/). There is a small instantaneous drop in likes, a
As part of the CHANSE initiative, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) financed (about 300,000€) the project “PolarVis: Visual Persuasion in a Transforming Europe” (2023-2026) led by Annie Waldherr (PI) and Nicola Righetti (co-PI). Climate change has been called the defining crisis of our time. In the last few years, millions of people have taken to
The report of the research project MINE-GE: Mapping Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior in the Lead Up to the 2021 German Federal Election has been released. During the project, which was funded by Landesanstalt für Medien Nordrhein Westfalen, we collected over 13,000 Facebook Ads, 2.5 million political posts, and 1.8 Million URLs shared on Facebook, Twitter, and
The Anti-Gender Debate on Social Media. A Computational Communication Science Analysis of Networks, Activism, and Misinformation (which can be freely accessed at this link) takes into account 10 years of anti-gender communication on Facebook in Italy, and proposes a multifaceted analysis of different aspects of the debate, including activism and misinformation. It shows that both
A new paper briefly reviewing the scientific literature on fake news published up to 2020 is online on First Monday. You can read it here: Four Years of Fake News. A Quantitative Analysis of the Scientific Literature Abstract Introduction: Since 2016, “fake news” has been the main buzzword for online misinformation and disinformation. This term
A new paper (open access!) is out: Digital Animal Advocacy: A Study on Facebook Communication Styles of Italian Animal Rights Organizations and their Followers’ Reactions. The paper analyzes the Facebook communication of the Italian galaxy of Italian animal advocates by using a text-mining approach, and reflects on the role of social media in promoting specific
Pandemic are scary. There is nothing worse that an invisible enemy to spread anxiety. Information is partial, contradictory. Rumors and minsinformation flourish. People have to grapple daily with uncertainty and fear. Such a context is a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and their harmful consequences. Among the interesting phenomena that have been observed so far,