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 conceptualize and operationalize the study of transnational communication on social media.
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 process, which included rigorous qualitative reviews by NYU editors, was both challenging and rewarding.
Visualizing the networks on the maps was challenging due to the relatively high number of nodes and relationships. Finding the right combination of graphical elements to allow for a clear representation required evaluating a variety of alternatives. I used R with rnaturalearth and the ggplot2 function geom_sf().
Visualizing the roles of actors and organizations in the various World Congress of Families required combining visual and analytical logic. The decision was made to position actors and organizations with a more constant presence at the base, visually emphasizing their foundational role in the events, with others gradually placed in higher positions. The use of color transparency further highlights both the constant presence (represented by less transparent colors) and the fluctuating or occasional presence (represented by higher transparency) at the events. For this purpose, I used a heatmap with the geom_tile() function in ggplot2. All data preprocessing and visualizations were done in R.
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 and will soon be available in the journal. The pre-print version is available on OSF: https://osf.io/zya2x_v3/
[Note added April 17, 2025] In the past few days, this blog post has received an unusual spike in visits, linked to distribution via a mailing list I was able to trace. I also received a violent and hateful email, sent from a mobile iPhone app and an IP address I identified and reported to the Italian and Austrian authorities. I stand by the scientific work discussed here and will not tolerate coordinated online harassment, threats, or intimidation. Academic dialogue and dissent — as well as support for any moral values — must be grounded in reason, not hate.
[Original blog post] My latest work, now online in Information, Communication & Society, explores 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 social media platforms like Facebook serve as powerful tools for disseminating and globalizing radical ‘anti-gender’ ideas. Despite the growing transnational appeal of these ideas, the role of digital networks in this process remains largely underexplored. By analyzing a decade of multilingual social media activity (2013–2022) from the leading conservative organization CitizenGO using advanced computational methods, we shed light on key strategies that drive the digital presence of the anti-gender agenda.
Our findings reveal that CitizenGO strategically employs a diverse array of social media accounts to coordinate and amplify moral-conservative messages across different languages and regions. An amplification network sharing their content also facilitates their rapid transnational expansion.
For those interested in a deeper dive into our research, you can read the full paper here.
Righetti, N., Kulichkina, A., Almeida Paroni, B., Cseri, Z. F., Aguirre, S. I., & Maikovska, K. (2025). Mainstreaming and transnationalization of anti-gender ideas through social media: the case of CitizenGO. Information, Communication & Society, 1–24. doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2470229
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 concepts discussed in this article were presented during my research colloquium as a Visiting Research Fellow at the ZeMKi Centre for Media, Communication, and Information Research at the University of Bremen on May 15, 2024. I also benefited from discussions with Nguyen-Phuong Tran, currently a doctoral student in Urbino, who provided valuable insights into social media in Vietnam. Our conversations on the concept of online firestorms were particularly enriching.
Many thanks to the editors of ISR – Italian Sociological Review for their valuable work and for making this high-quality journal freely accessible.
For those interested, the full paper is available here: link.
In this paper we analyze 200,000 posts published on Facebook pages and groups mentioning veganism, articulating a typology of social media functions for veganism.
In addition, we develop a critical methodological reflection on the limitations and potential of “big data” for studying the phenomenon.
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 slight inversion in the overall trend, and a persistent decrease in the average likes from before to after the policy implementation. The analysis is just exploratory and has several limitations (e.g., small sample size), but the effect looks clear.
The analysis is directly inspired by the recent paper of Gu et al. It is, in fact, a quick check of their findings in the Italian context: Gu, J., Dor, A., Li, K., Broniatowski, D. A., Hatheway, M., Fritz, L., & Abroms, L. C. (2022). The impact of Facebook’s vaccine misinformation policy on user endorsements of vaccine content: An interrupted time series analysis. Vaccine, 40(14), 2209-2214.
The Facebook accounts spreading misinformation that I employed in the analysis come from the MINE project: Giglietto, F., Farci, M., Marino, G., Mottola, S., Radicioni, T., & Terenzi, M. (2022, January 7). Mapping Nefarious Social Media Actors to Speed-up Covid-19 Fact-checking. https://lnkd.in/eRMzrrvP
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 streets to demand urgent action on the escalating ecological emergency. Social media have had great importance in the development of the movement. For example, the virality of posts on Twitter and Instagram has quickly transformed the activist Greta Thunberg into an iconic figure, attracting supportive but also openly hostile reactions. The importance of images in the online communication of the movement and the emotions moving these activists and those who attack them online draw attention to the symbolic and emotional role of images for social movements. The PolarVis project will examine the role of visual content in processes of political polarization and belonging in the digital age by focusing on the intergenerational issue of climate change and the green transition.
PolarVis: Visual persuasion in a transforming Europe: The affective and polarizing power of visual content in online political discourse will be led by Annie Waldherr (PI) and Nicola Righetti (Co-PI), and supported by a postdoctoral researcher as well as a student research assistant. The funding provided by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) totals to around € 300.000 over the course of the next three years. The Viennese project of PolarVis is part of a large and interdisciplinary international consortium within the CHANSE initiative. The consortium is led by Alexandra Segerberg of the Department of Government at Uppsala Universitet, Sweden.
Further information on the project can be accessed here.
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 Instagram by parties, candidates, and other social media users in the six weeks up to the election day, to monitor political social media communication, detect coordinated networks and analyze possible micro-targeting strategies.
The report is available in English and German on the website of Landesanstalt für Medien Nordrhein Westfalen at the following links:
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 right-wing/populists/religious and pro-LGBTQI+ actors were involved in the debate, but the former got more engagement. Notably, religious accounts got even more engagement than the right-wing ones. Also, posts from left-wing parties’ accounts were just a few.
The most engaging posts against Gender came from Radio Maria, a popular (and sometimes controversial) catholic radio, and the conversations peaked in 2015, close to the conservative manifestation “Family Day”, but religious actors have kept paying attention to the issue.
Time series analysis suggested that Facebook posts mostly amplified an agenda set by news media following offline events. Similarly, Facebook has been used to amplify “traditional” types of activism, like petitions “against gender”.
However, an analysis through CooRnet also revealed the presence of coordinated Facebook networks spreading news stories on gender ideology, also coming from websites renowned for spreading misinformation and low-quality, click-bait news stories.
Still on the subject of misinformation, the analysis shows that 2% of the about 20,000 analyzed Facebook posts associated LGBTQI+ people and organizations with paedophilia by means of “gender ideology”.
