I discussed at the University of Vienna my experience collaborating with the European Commission on the Digital Services Act (DSA). I highlighted five critical lessons learned about accessing data from major online platforms to study systemic risks.
The study investigates the role of religious users in online political discourse around abortion during Italy’s 2022 election. Despite representing only 1.08% of users, they generated significant engagement, often discussing religious themes and restrictive policies. Their relationship with right-wing parties is complex, revealing selective support aligned with moral values.
How do visuals shape political discourse? In a recent work for PolarVis I have developed an interactive Power BI report to explore how environmental-related images influenced public reactions during the 2021 German federal elections. Images are powerful tools for persuasion. They can evoke strong emotions, simplify complex ideas, and rapidly spread messages across vast networks.
Over the past decade, one of the central strands of my research has focused on the rise and diffusion of anti-gender traditionalism across digital platforms. By introducing computational methods and digital trace data—still relatively new in this field—I have examined how anti-gender movements, from grassroots cultural resistance in Italy to the transnationalization of CitizenGo’s conservative
I’m happy to share that our new article, “Waves of Attention to Racial Injustice on Social Media: Extrajudicial Police Killings in the United States as Focusing Events”, is now published open access in Social Science Computer Review. The study addresses a crucial yet underexplored question: Why do some victims of police violence become powerful symbols
I’m pleased to share that my article “Anti-Gender Fundamentalist Traditionalism and Vulnerability to Misinformation” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Media and Religion (also see the preprint and free copies linked at the end of this post). This paper is part of a broader research program I’ve been developing over the past
New publication! We present our multi-modal, multi-platform R software for analyzing coordinated networks—designed to remain resilient to ongoing changes in data access and to offer analytical flexibility—in the paper “CooRTweet: A Generalized R Software for Coordinated Network Detection“, now out in Computational Communication Research. Free access here: https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2025.1.7.RIGH. Although CooRTweet is a relatively new tool,
The working paper Investigating Transnational Communication on Social Media is now available on OSF. This paper was presented and discussed at the workshop titled Transnationalization of the Far-Right, held at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy, on Tuesday, April 8th, 2025. It marks the beginning of an effort to systematically
I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with Phillip Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl on their influential work, “The Global Fight Against Lgbti Rights: How Transnational Conservative Networks Target Sexual and Gender Minorities” (NYU Press). This project involved creating data visualizations that captured the analytical and communicative intent of the authors, starting from relatively complex datasets.
The paper “CooRTweet: A Generalized R Software for Coordinated Network Detection” (Righetti & Balluff) describing our CooRTweet software, has been accepted for publication on Computational Communication Research. The paper is available open access at: https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2025.1.7.RIGH.