I have been awarded research fellowships at leading European centers for the study of information and communication dynamics in contemporary society, including a Visiting Fellowship at ZeMKI – Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research at the University of Bremen (May 6 to June 2, 2024) and a Visiting Fellowship at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Free University of Berlin, in December 2021.
Earlier, in 2019, I was part of the Italian team granted access to unprecedented Facebook data and invited to specialized research training at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park to learn about and experiment with one of the largest social science datasets ever created, totaling about an exabyte (a quintillion bytes, or a billion gigabytes) of raw data from the platform.
I have also been invited to deliver talks, research seminars, and guest lectures at several institutions across Europe. These include the “Lunch Seminars” at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences – COSMOS, Scuola Normale Superiore, where on November 6, 2024, I presented the talk “Exploring the Role of Facebook in Conservative Networks” as part of the panel “Strategic Impact in Advocacy and the Transnational Level of Mobilization: Legal, Organizational, and Digital Strategies” (link). I also gave an invited presentation for the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) Training on November 27, 2024, titled “Introduction to Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Concepts, Methods and Tools for Surfacing Orchestrated (Dis)information Campaigns”. Earlier engagements include, among others, an invited lecture at the School of Government of Luiss Guido Carli University (Executive Master in Politics and Digital Technologies) on January 23, 2021, where I addressed “Online Disinformation and Media Manipulation”. Other invitations include guest PhD lectures and seminars on advanced l methodological topics in the social sciences, including Computational Text Analysis with R at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo (February 7–9, 2023) and Digital Methods and Big Data at the University of Cagliari (July 16, 2024).
Since 2025, I have been engaged as an expert for the European Commission, contributing to a broader research initiative on the societal and informational dynamics of very large online platforms (VLOPs). Within this framework, I lead a dedicated research stream, with responsibilities including designing the research plan, conducting data collection and analysis, and delivering policy-relevant insights to support digital governance efforts.