Fabio Giglietto

Fabio Giglietto is Full Professor of Internet Studies at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo (as of August 2026), the university where he also earned his doctorate. His research sits at the crossroads of computational social science, digital platform analysis and political communication, with a particular focus on information disorders and coordinated behaviour on social media. His teaching has included courses on Generative AI and Media and Digital Social Network Analysis. In 2017 he founded the Mapping Italian News Research Program (MINE), which he has coordinated ever since. Its externally funded sub-projects on elections, public opinion and health information had all concluded by February 2026; MINE itself remains active as the institutional umbrella for his research line.

Within MINE he co-developed CooRnet, with Nicola Righetti and Luca Rossi: an open-source R package that introduced the Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior (CLSB) detection method and was applied internationally by researchers, journalists and fact-checkers. Operational development of the package ended after Meta shut down CrowdTangle, on which it relied for data access, in August 2024, but the CLSB methodology continued to inform independent downstream tools such as CooRTweet, developed by other scholars. In EU-funded research, he led Work Package 4 of the Horizon Europe project vera.ai (concluded October 2025), which developed AI-based tools for countering disinformation, and was a partner on PROMPT (concluded February 2026), which monitored disinformation narratives in Europe.

He has also served the European Commission as an independent expert. As a member of the Joint Research Centre expert group on systemic risks of very large online platforms — a study contributing to the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency under Article 40(12) of the Digital Services Act — he provided scientific oversight of the group's research projects, monitored the platform data-access request process and authored its summary reports, delivered in 2026. He was appointed evaluator and rapporteur for the European Education and Culture Executive Agency, an appointment that, as of August 2026, ran to September 2026. His 2025 working paper on Meta's political content reduction policy was cited in a written question to the European Commission and drew national coverage in Italy, including Il Sole 24 Ore, Il Resto del Carlino, Open and Lumsanews.

He is a founding partner of Digit Srl, a benefit-corporation spin-off of the University of Urbino Carlo Bo that builds digital platforms for civic participation, sustainability, social innovation and science communication. As of August 2026 he is a member of the International Communication Association, the Association of Internet Researchers and the Italian Association for Political Communication, and he has served on the board of Research Committee 51 on Sociocybernetics of the International Sociological Association.