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, […]
Political and health misinformation are huge problems today. Both can have nefarious consequences on individuals, citizens, institutions and society. As I and co-authors have recently observed in our paper “Blurred Shots: Investigating the Information Crisis Around Vaccination in Italy”, politicization can increase the circulation of misinformation on vaccines “both directly and by opening the door
Today we have released CooRnet, an R package developed for detecting coordinated link sharing behavior on Facebook and Instagram. Given a list of URLs, the package queries the CrowdTangle API link endpoint and retrieves the Facebook shares performed by public pages, groups and verified accounts, identifying the networks involved in coordinated activity. The basic functions
I am pleased to announce that it has just been published “Understanding Coordinated and Inauthentic Link Sharing Behavior on Facebook in the Run-up to 2018 General Election and 2019 European Election in Italy”. This report is the first outcome of our research project funded by the Social Science Research Council in partnership with Facebook and
In recent years technological beings have been entering our individual and social lives in ever increasing numbers. From virtual personal assistants like Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa and Google Home to robots working with us and for us, artificial creatures are leaving both the fictional world they inhabited for centuries and the industrial and
On June 24, 2019 the University of Urbino hosted the first AoIR Flashpoint Symposium. I am really happy to have contributed to the success of the event with the other members of the organizing committee. The Flashpoint Symposium is a new format of academic meeting that, as the president of the Association of Internet Researchers Axel Bruns
It has just been published on Information, Communication & Society “Diverging patterns of interaction around news on social media: insularity and partisanship during the 2018 Italian election campaign”. I co-authored this paper with Fabio Giglietto, Augusto Valeriani and Giada Marino, devoting most of my attention to the methodological and statistical analyses sections. The study –
It has just been published “Multi-Party Media Partisanship Attention Score. Estimating Partisan Attention of News Media Sources Using Twitter Data in the Lead-up to 2018 Italian Election”. Extending the computational method first introduced by Benkler, Faris, Roberts and others (see here and here), the paper makes use of Twitter data to measure partisan attention to