We have released CooRTweet version 2.0. This version revises the approach, fixes some bugs, and introduces new features. The package and introductory vignette can be found on CRAN: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/CooRTweet.
I have uploaded the instructional materials for my Advanced Data Analysis course on mediation and moderation for the Master in Communication Science at the University of Vienna at this link. The material includes a brief introduction to R and RStudio, a short summary of exploratory data analysis and linear regression, and sections dedicated to mediation,
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
Update: this post refers to the first versions of the package CooRTweet, which is now a multi platform package for coordinated behavior analysis. Read more here. I have just release the beta version of CooRTweet, an R package that I developed to help detecting coordinated networks on Twitter. The CooRTweet package builds on the existing
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
For the Advanced Data Analysis with R course in the University of Vienna’s Master in Communication Science, I created a free online book explaining key R functions and data analysis operations, with a focus on time series analysis. You can find it here: Time Series Analysis With R
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