My research focuses on pressing social phenomena that drive major socio-political conflicts, examined through the lens of digital media, while also considering their broader connections to societal dynamics. My current research agenda centers on the digital dimensions of ultra-conservative mobilization around moral issues, with a particular emphasis on gender-related topics. I have also focused on veganism and the animal rights movement, climate change activism and communication, as well as the intersection of religion and politics.
My methodological expertise is in digital, computational, and statistical methods, with a particular focus on their application to digital media data. I co-developed R software packages, such as CooRnet and CooRTweet, for network analysis of coordinated behavior. On my GitHub page you can find repositories containing code and methodological materials.
Recent grants and externally funded research projects
I have served as Principal Investigator and co-Principal Investigator for international and national research projects, with about €400,000 in funding since 2021, and have also contributed as a team member to several other national and international research projects.
2025 – Research grant awarded by the University of Urbino Carlo Bo (€20,000) for high-ranking results in the European project “European Value Wars and Religion: How Anti-EU and Anti-Gender Religious Radicalism from Below Challenges EU Institutions, Religious Establishments, and Political Parties (VALUEWaR)” submitted under the Horizon Europe framework and placed on the Reserve List for 2024.
2024 – Digital Media and Gender Polarization: Survey on the Anti-Gender Phenomenon in Italy. Principal Investigator (€3,500). Competitive Grant by Department DISCUI, University of Urbino Carlo Bo
2024 – Vera AI (VERification Assisted by Artificial Intelligence). EU Horizon Project (https://www.veraai.eu/home). Team Member.
2023 – Countering Online Radicalization and incivility in ITaly: from fringe to mainstream – CORIT. Team member.
2021 – PolarVis: Visual Persuasion in a Transforming Europe: the affective and polarizing power of visual content in online political discourse. Co-Principal Investigator (€285,837.09). Funded by “CHANSE, Call on Transformations: Social and Cultural Dynamics in The Digital Age”. Besides Univ. of Vienna (AT), the consortium includes Univ. of Uppsala (SWE), Univ. of Copenhagen (DK), IT Univ. of Copenhagen (DK), and Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HU).
2021 – MINE-GE: Mapping Coordinated Activities During the 2021 German Election. Principal Investigator (€69,535.64). Funded by Die Landesanstalt für Medien North-Rhine Westphalia.
2019 – Patterns of Facebook Interactions around Insular and Cross-Partisan Media Sources in the Run-up of the 2018 Italian Election. Team member. Funded by SSRC Social Science Research Council in partnership with Facebook. Our team was among the 12 teams from all around the world that were selected to get unprecedented access to new datasets and tools to study problematic information online (see also this article on Nature). The project included a stay at the
headquarter of Facebook in Menlo Park, California, for a period of training with Facebook engineers and academics from Harvard and Stanford who developed the project and the
tools shared with the external researchers.
2018 – Mapping Italian News Social Media and Democracy. Team member. Partially founded by Open Society Fundations. The project has mapped the online dynamics during the Italian elections and relevant socio-political crises. https://mine.uniurb.it.