
Fabio Giglietto
Professor of Internet Studies
University of Urbino
Department of Communication Sciences, Humanities and International Studies
About Me
Fabio Giglietto, PhD, is Professor of Internet Studies in the Department of Communication Sciences, Humanities and International Studies at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, where he leads teaching and research on the social implications of digital media. His work examines the relationships between social systems, media, and digital technologies, with a particular focus on how information circulates across platforms and how platform dynamics shape public discourse. He has published extensively in leading journals, including Journal of Communication, Information, Communication & Society, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Social Media + Society, and Social Science Computer Review.
His research contributes to the fields of computational social science, platform studies, and the analysis of mis/disinformation. Among his most cited works are studies of second-screen participation on Twitter, the methodological potentials and limits of using social platforms as data sources, and investigations into coordinated link-sharing behavior during national elections. His publications also include analyses of the dynamics of false information within hybrid news systems and the discursive strategies surrounding major breaking-news events, reflecting a sustained interest in how attention, coordination, and credibility are produced and contested online.
Current projects build on this trajectory by combining large-scale platform data with theory-driven analyses of information flows, influence operations, and media ecosystems. He regularly engages with ongoing debates on data access, platform governance, and the reproducibility of digital research, and he collaborates with interdisciplinary teams to develop transparent, accountable methodologies for studying online political communication. His recent public-facing commentary and scholarly activity highlight evolving patterns of cross-platform coordination, the role of algorithmic curation in shaping news exposure, and best practices for auditing platform interventions.
At the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Professor Giglietto mentors students and early-career researchers working at the intersection of media studies and computational approaches. He is actively involved in international research networks and contributes to comparative projects that monitor political communication and disinformation across electoral cycles. With a portfolio of 20 publications and over 1,700 citations, his work informs academics, journalists, and policymakers seeking rigorous, evidence-based insights into the social life of information in the platform era.
Recent Publications
TRANSFORMATIVE TOOLS, EMERGING CHALLENGES: EMPIRICAL AND PRACTICAL EXPERIENCES WITH LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS FOR TEXT CLASSIFICATION AND ANNOTATION IN COMMUNICATION STUDIES
Choucair, T., Kathirgamalingam, A., Lind, F., Bernhard, J., Boomgaarden, H., Oliveira, B., Maia, R., Vodden, L., Esau, K., Bruns, A., Svegaard, S., Farfan, K., Meyer, H., Puschmann, C., Brüggemann, M., Giglietto, F., Rossi, L., Righetti, N., & Marino, G. (2025). TRANSFORMATIVE TOOLS, EMERGING CHALLENGES: EMPIRICAL AND PRACTICAL EXPERIENCES WITH LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS FOR TEXT CLASSIFICATION AND ANNOTATION IN COMMUNICATION STUDIES. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2024i0.14102
THE BRAZILIAN DIGITAL BATTLEFIELD: INVESTIGATING THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICAL INFORMATION CAMPAIGNS IN POST-BOLSONARO ERA
Marino, G., Almeida Paroni, B., & Giglietto, F. (2024). THE BRAZILIAN DIGITAL BATTLEFIELD: INVESTIGATING THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICAL INFORMATION CAMPAIGNS IN POST-BOLSONARO ERA. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2024i0.13999
Analisi Computazionale del Parallelismo Politico in Italia: Il Caso delle Elezioni 2022
Giglietto, F. (2024). Analisi Computazionale del Parallelismo Politico in Italia: Il Caso delle Elezioni 2022. .
Evaluating Embedding Models for Clustering Italian Political News: A Comparative Study of Text-Embedding-3-Large and UmBERTo
Giglietto, F. (2024). Evaluating Embedding Models for Clustering Italian Political News: A Comparative Study of Text-Embedding-3-Large and UmBERTo. Center for Open Science. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/2j9ed
Facebook reactions in the context of politics and social issues: a systematic literature review
Anwar, S., & Giglietto, F. (2024). Facebook reactions in the context of politics and social issues: a systematic literature review. Frontiers in Sociology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1379265
Research Projects

vera.ai - VERification Assisted by Artificial Intelligence
An EU-funded Horizon Europe project developing advanced AI-based tools to assist journalists and fact-checkers in verifying multimedia content and combating disinformation. As Work Package 4 leader, I focus on the detection of coordinated behavior and inauthentic networks spreading misleading content.
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PROMPT - Predictive Research On Misinformation and Narratives Propagation Trajectories
An EU-funded initiative focused on detecting and analyzing disinformation narratives across Europe, addressing sensitive issues including the war in Ukraine, LGBTQI+ rights, and European elections through the development of language models, monitoring dashboards, and educational resources for fact-checkers and journalists.
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MINE - Mapping Italian News Research Program
A research program investigating Italian news media coverage and the impact of social media on Italian elections, leveraging data from Social Science One and grant funding from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
Learn moreBehind the screen: The use of Facebook accounts with inauthentic behavior during European elections
Language Disparities in Moderation Workforce Allocation by Social Media Platforms
Amplifying the regime: identifying coordinated activity of pro-government Telegram channels in Russia and Belarus
Ranking authority: A critical audit of YouTube’s content moderation
Suspicious stories: taking narrative seriously in disinformation research
The medium is not the message: Deconfounding text embeddings via linear concept erasure
Multimodal coordinated online behavior: Trade-offs and strategies
ConflLlama: Domain-specific adaptation of large language models for conflict event classification
Demystifying hashtag hijacking in the public opinion game: attention, narratives, and social bots
Shapeshifters and starseeds: Populist knowledge production, generous epistemology, and disinformation on U.s. conspiracy TikTok
TikTok's Research API: Problems Without Explanations
Misinformation beyond traditional feeds: Evidence from a WhatsApp deactivation experiment in Brazil
True costs of misinformation| mountains of evidence: Processual “redpilling” as a Socio-technical effect of disinformation
From fake news to real protests: WhatsApp’s role in Brazilian political coordination
They want to pretend not to understand: The Limits of Current LLMs in Interpreting Implicit Content of Political Discourse
Using co-sharing to identify use of mainstream news for promoting potentially misleading narratives
Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X’s Community Notes
Quantifying narrative similarity across languages
Forgetful by design? A critical audit of YouTube's search API for academic research
Post-hoc evaluation of nodes influence in information cascades: The case of coordinated accounts
The cost of reach: Testing the role of ad delivery algorithms in online political campaigns
A systematic review of echo chamber research: comparative analysis of conceptualizations, operationalizations, and varying outcomes
Coordinated link sharing on Facebook
A political cartography of news sharing: Capturing story, outlet and content level of news circulation on Twitter
Coordinated inauthentic behavior on TikTok: Challenges and opportunities for detection in a video-first ecosystem
The effects of political advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US election
The end of trust and safety?: Examining the future of content moderation and upheavals in professional online safety efforts
Emergent structures of attention on social media are driven by amplification and triad transitivity
So long twitter, and thanks for all the tweets
The role of far-right party performance in shaping disinformation concerns of European voters: evidence from the 2024 European Parliament elections
The quality of connections: Deliberative reciprocity and inclusive listening as antidote to destructive polarization online
Untangling the furball: A practice mapping approach to the analysis of multimodal interactions in social networks
Evaluating how LLM annotations represent diverse views on contentious topics
Platforms, politics, and the crisis of democracy: Connective action and the rise of illiberalism
Advancing the study of political misinformation across countries and platforms—introduction to the special issue
Multi-Modal Framing Analysis of News
Influence operations as brokerage: Political-economic infrastructures of manipulation in the 2022 Philippine elections
The discursive function of Meta’s Newsroom: How Meta frames the problem of problematic online content
Beyond interaction patterns: Assessing claims of coordinated inter-state information operations on twitter/X
What did we learn about political communication from the Meta2020 partnership?
The news feed is not a black box: A longitudinal study of Facebook’s algorithmic treatment of news
When do parties lie? Misinformation and radical-right populism across 26 countries
Curation bubbles
All the (fake) news that’s fit to share? News values in perceived misinformation across twenty-four countries
Scaling open-ended survey responses using LLM-paired comparisons
Positioning political texts with large language models by asking and averaging
Network ripple effects: How Twitter deplatforming flipped authority structure and discourse of the Arizona Election Review community
Best practices for source-based research on misinformation and news trustworthiness using NewsGuard
Facts or feelings? Leveraging emotionality as a fact-checking strategy on social media in the United States
How propaganda exploits the infrastructure of truth: A case study of \#IStandWithPutin
Unsupervised framing analysis for social media discourse in polarizing events
Visual identities in troll farms: The Twitter Moderation Research Consortium
Platform polarization. Do alternative platforms drive discursive polarization?
Red-Teaming in the Public Interest
TikTok ‘dogshows’ and the amplification of online incivility among Gen Z influencers in the Philippines
Divergent patterns of engagement with partisan and low-quality news across seven social media platforms
The diffusion and reach of (mis)information on Facebook during the U.s. 2020 election
IOHunter: Graph foundation model to uncover online information operations
Beyond time delays: How web scraping distorts measures of online news consumption
Algorithmic media use and algorithm literacy: An integrative literature review
Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI
The sound of disinformation: TikTok, computational propaganda, and the invasion of Ukraine
Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation
Estimating the ideology of political YouTube videos
Political science. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook
News & Updates
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September 08, 2025
#toread #paper Behind the screen: The use of Facebook accounts with inauthentic behavior during European elections by Oprea, Bogdan et al. https://sch...
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September 07, 2025
#toread #paper The spread of pro- and anti-vaccine views by coordinated communities on facebook during COVID-19 pandemic by Song, Yunya et al. https:/...
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August 31, 2025
#toread #paper TikTok s Research API: Problems Without Explanations by Entrena-Serrano, Carlos et al. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=TikToks%20R...
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While they're pretty smart, they might occasionally hallucinate a publication or get creative with facts. Take it with a grain of digital salt! 🧂