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 European Commission’s Joint Research Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT) Research Workshop 2025, where I was invited to deliver a talk about anti-feminism mainstreaming in digital media, and 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). Other invited presentation include “Introduction to Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Concepts, Methods and Tools for Surfacing Orchestrated (Dis)information Campaigns” at the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) Training on November 27, 2024, and 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”.
I also gave guest PhD lectures, seminars and workshops on advanced methodological topics in the social sciences, including “Computational Text Analysis with R” at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo (February 7–9, 2023), “Digital Methods and Big Data” at the University of Cagliari (July 16, 2024), and “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Detection Software” at the Misinformation Moderation by Social Media Platforms at the Digital Methods Initiative of the University of Amsterdam, Department of Media Studies (link).
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.