My specific expertise lies in digital, computational, and statistical methods applied to digital media data. I am a co-developer of the R software packages for network analysis of coordinated behavior CooRnet and CooRTweet. On my GitHub page you can find repositories containing code and methodological materials.
My research focuses on the most pressing social phenomena that drive major socio-political conflicts. These include the anti-gender movement—encompassing anti-feminism and the men’s rights movement—veganism and the animal rights movement, as well as the intersection of religion and politics. I primarily examine these phenomena through the lens of digital communication, while also considering their broader connections to societal dynamics. My current research agenda centers on the digital dimensions of ultra-conservative mobilization around moral issues, with a particular emphasis on gender-related topics.
Recent grants and externally funded research projects
2024 – Digital Media and Gender Polarization: Survey on the Anti-Gender Phenomenon in Italy. Principal Investigator (3,500 EUR). Competitive Grant by Department DISCUI, University of Urbino Carlo Bo
2023 – Countering Online Radicalization and incivility in ITaly: from fringe to mainstream – CORIT. Team member.
2021 – PolarVis: Visual Persuasion in a Transforming Europe: the affective and polarizing power of visual content in online political discourse. Co-Principal Investigator (285,837.09 EUR). Funded by “CHANSE, Call on Transformations: Social and Cultural Dynamics in The Digital Age”. Besides Univ. of Vienna (AT), the consortium includes Univ. of Uppsala (SWE), Univ. of Copenhagen (DK), IT Univ. of Copenhagen (DK), and Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HU).
2021 – MINE-GE: Mapping Coordinated Activities During the 2021 German Election. Principal Investigator (69,535.64 EUR). Funded by Die Landesanstalt für Medien North-Rhine Westphalia.
2019 – Patterns of Facebook Interactions around Insular and Cross-Partisan Media Sources in the Run-up of the 2018 Italian Election. Team member. Funded by SSRC Social Science Research Council in partnership with Facebook. Our team was among the 12 teams from all around the world that were selected to get unprecedented access to new datasets and tools to study problematic information online (see also this article on Nature). The project included a stay at the
headquarter of Facebook in Menlo Park, California, for a period of training with Facebook engineers and academics from Harvard and Stanford who developed the project and the
tools shared with the external researchers.
2018 – Mapping Italian News Social Media and Democracy. Team member. Partially founded by Open Society Fundations. The project has mapped the online dynamics during the Italian elections and relevant socio-political crises. https://mine.uniurb.it.