Ranking authority: A critical audit of YouTube’s content moderation
This chapter examines YouTube’s content moderation practices during the 2024 European Parliamentary elections. Using search results from the Nether...
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 teaches Internet Studies and leads research at the intersection of communication, society, and digital technologies. His work examines how media systems and social platforms shape public discourse, with a particular focus on the theory of information, the dynamics of attention, and the interplay between social systems and digital infrastructures.
Giglietto has published extensively in leading journals, including the Journal of Communication, Information, Communication & Society, the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Social Media + Society, and Social Science Computer Review. His highly cited studies span second-screen participation, platform data as research infrastructure, and information manipulation in hybrid media systems. Representative works include “Second Screen and Participation: A Content Analysis on a Full Season Dataset of Tweets,” “The Open Laboratory: Limits and Possibilities of Using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as a Research Data Source,” and “It Takes a Village to Manipulate the Media: Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior during the 2018 and 2019 Italian Elections.”
His current research centers on the detection and analysis of coordinated online behaviors, the circulation of false and misleading information, and the methodological challenges of studying social platforms at scale. Drawing on computational social science and mixed-method approaches, he investigates how news, political messaging, and grassroots communities interact across platforms, and how platform governance and data access shape what scholars and the public can know about digital publics. He frequently shares research insights and ongoing project updates through professional networks, highlighting collaborations that bridge academic rigor with policy-relevant impact.
Across more than 20 publications and a substantial citation record, Giglietto’s work informs debates on media accountability, platform transparency, and the resilience of democratic communication. As Professor of Internet Studies, he mentors students and early-career researchers, collaborates with international teams, and contributes to public conversations about disinformation, media manipulation, and the evolving role of platforms in contemporary society.
This bio is automatically generated by AI using aggregated data from publications, research activities, and academic profiles.
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. .
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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 moreShapeshifters and starseeds: Populist knowledge production, generous epistemology, and disinformation on U.s. conspiracy TikTok
This article investigates the intersection of identity, power, and knowledge production on U.S. ConspiracyTok, a genre of TikTok videos promoting c...
ConflLlama: Domain-specific adaptation of large language models for conflict event classification
We present ConflLlama, demonstrating how efficient fine-tuning of large language models can advance automated classification tasks in political sci...
Suspicious stories: taking narrative seriously in disinformation research
Abstract The concept of narrative has been widely employed in the disinformation literature. Nonetheless, its use has been dominated by loose intui...
Demystifying hashtag hijacking in the public opinion game: attention, narratives, and social bots
Published in Inf. Commun. Soc. | Year: 2025 | Authors: Zhao, Bei, Ren, Wujiong, He, Yuan, Zhang, Hongzhong
Multimodal coordinated online behavior: Trade-offs and strategies
Coordinated online behavior, which spans from beneficial collective actions to harmful manipulation such as disinformation campaigns, has become a ...
The medium is not the message: Deconfounding text embeddings via linear concept erasure
Embedding-based similarity metrics between text sequences can be influenced not just by the content dimensions we most care about, but can also be ...
True costs of misinformation| mountains of evidence: Processual “redpilling” as a Socio-technical effect of disinformation
How do people come to believe Far-Right, extremist, and conspiratorial ideas they encounter online? This article examines how participants in prima...
From fake news to real protests: WhatsApp’s role in Brazilian political coordination
The growth of social networks has raised concerns about the misuse of these platforms by disinformation campaigns, social bots, and coordinated act...
Quantifying narrative similarity across languages
How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how inter...
Misinformation beyond traditional feeds: Evidence from a WhatsApp deactivation experiment in Brazil
Published in J. Polit. | Year: 2025 | Authors: Ventura, Tiago, Majumdar, Rajeshwari, Nagler, Jonathan, Tucker, Joshua
Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X’s Community Notes
We use crowd-sourced assessments from X’s Community Notes program to examine whether there are partisan differences in the sharing of misleading in...
Using co-sharing to identify use of mainstream news for promoting potentially misleading narratives
Much of the research quantifying volume and spread of online misinformation measures the construct at the source level, identifying a set of specif...
Forgetful by design? A critical audit of YouTube's search API for academic research
This paper critically audits the search endpoint of YouTube's Data API (v3), a common tool for academic research. Through systematic weekly searche...
They want to pretend not to understand: The Limits of Current LLMs in Interpreting Implicit Content of Political Discourse
Implicit content plays a crucial role in political discourse, where speakers systematically employ pragmatic strategies such as implicatures and pr...
The effects of political advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US election
We study the effects of social media political advertising by randomizing subsets of 36,906 Facebook users and 25,925 Instagram users to have polit...
Post-hoc evaluation of nodes influence in information cascades: The case of coordinated accounts
In the last few years, social media has gained an unprecedented amount of attention, playing a pivotal role in shaping the contemporary landscape o...
The cost of reach: Testing the role of ad delivery algorithms in online political campaigns
Published in Polit. Commun. | Year: 2025 | Authors: Votta, Fabio, Dobber, Tom, Guinaudeau, Benjamin, Helberger, Natali, de Vreese, Claes
Coordinated link sharing on Facebook
Malicious actors regularly attempt to manipulate social media using coordinated posting. Many existing methods for detecting this coordination, tho...
A systematic review of echo chamber research: comparative analysis of conceptualizations, operationalizations, and varying outcomes
Abstract This systematic review synthesizes research on echo chambers and filter bubbles to explore the reasons behind dissent regarding their exis...
Coordinated inauthentic behavior on TikTok: Challenges and opportunities for detection in a video-first ecosystem
Detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) is central to the study of online influence operations. However, most methods focus on text-centri...
A political cartography of news sharing: Capturing story, outlet and content level of news circulation on Twitter
News sharing on digital platforms shapes the digital spaces millions of users navigate. Trace data from these platforms also enables researchers to...
So long twitter, and thanks for all the tweets
This chapter reviews the historical contribution of Twitter before it was rebranded as X in July 2023. Twitter was an open platform for social scie...
The quality of connections: Deliberative reciprocity and inclusive listening as antidote to destructive polarization online
Conflict and disagreement are integral to healthy democracies, but the extreme polarization observed on many social media platforms poses a serious...
Untangling the furball: A practice mapping approach to the analysis of multimodal interactions in social networks
This article introduces the analytical approach of practice mapping , using vector embeddings of network actions and interactions to map commonalit...
The end of trust and safety?: Examining the future of content moderation and upheavals in professional online safety efforts
Year: 2025 | Authors: Moran, Rachel Elizabeth, Schafer, Joseph, Bayar, Mert, Starbird, Kate
Emergent structures of attention on social media are driven by amplification and triad transitivity
As they evolve, social networks tend to form transitive triads more often than random chance and structural constraints would suggest. However, the...
The role of far-right party performance in shaping disinformation concerns of European voters: evidence from the 2024 European Parliament elections
Published in J. Eur. Public Policy | Year: 2025 | Authors: Gattermann, Katjana, van den Hoogen, Elske, de Vreese, Claes
Influence operations as brokerage: Political-economic infrastructures of manipulation in the 2022 Philippine elections
This study conceptualizes influence operations (IOs), an enterprise that orchestrates manipulative and inauthentic activities to achieve political ...
Advancing the study of political misinformation across countries and platforms—introduction to the special issue
The global spread of political misinformation poses serious challenges to democracies, eroding trust and distorting public discourse. However, rese...
Platforms, politics, and the crisis of democracy: Connective action and the rise of illiberalism
Democratic backsliding, the slow erosion of institutions, processes, and norms, has become more pronounced in many nations. Most scholars point to ...
Evaluating how LLM annotations represent diverse views on contentious topics
Researchers have proposed the use of generative large language models (LLMs) to label data for research and applied settings. This literature empha...
Multi-Modal Framing Analysis of News
Automated frame analysis of political communication is a popular task in computational social science that is used to study how authors select aspe...
The discursive function of Meta’s Newsroom: How Meta frames the problem of problematic online content
This article examines the social technology company Meta’s public communication on problematic content, via their official ‘Meta Newsroom’, within ...
Beyond interaction patterns: Assessing claims of coordinated inter-state information operations on twitter/X
Social media platforms have become key tools for coordinated influence operations, enabling state actors to manipulate public opinion through strat...
Best practices for source-based research on misinformation and news trustworthiness using NewsGuard
Researchers need reliable and valid tools to identify cases of untrustworthy information when studying the spread of misinformation on digital plat...
Scaling open-ended survey responses using LLM-paired comparisons
Survey researchers rely heavily on closed-ended questions to measure latent respondent characteristics like knowledge, policy positions, emotions, ...
Network ripple effects: How Twitter deplatforming flipped authority structure and discourse of the Arizona Election Review community
Content moderation decisions can have variable impacts on the events and discourses they aim to regulate. This study analyzes Twitter data from bef...
Visual identities in troll farms: The Twitter Moderation Research Consortium
The Twitter Moderation Research Consortium is a database of network propaganda and influence operations that includes 115,474 unique Twitter accoun...
Facts or feelings? Leveraging emotionality as a fact-checking strategy on social media in the United States
Emotionality is a well-established strategy for boosting audience engagement on social media. While fact-checking is positioned to provide objectiv...
All the (fake) news that’s fit to share? News values in perceived misinformation across twenty-four countries
While there is a strong scholarly interest surrounding the content of political misinformation online, much of this research concerns misinformatio...
When do parties lie? Misinformation and radical-right populism across 26 countries
The spread of misinformation has emerged as a global concern. Academic attention has recently shifted to emphasize the role of political elites as ...
Unsupervised framing analysis for social media discourse in polarizing events
This study investigates the concept of frames in the realm of online polarization, with a focus on social media platforms. The research extends the...
The news feed is not a black box: A longitudinal study of Facebook’s algorithmic treatment of news
This study examines the effects of a series of significant algorithm changes within Facebook’s News Feed on user engagement with news content on th...
How propaganda exploits the infrastructure of truth: A case study of \#IStandWithPutin
Published in Crit. Stud. Media Commun. | Year: 2025 | Authors: Graham, Timothy
What did we learn about political communication from the Meta2020 partnership?
Published in Polit. Commun. | Year: 2025 | Authors: Munger, Kevin
Curation bubbles
Information on social media is characterized by networked curation processes in which users select other users from whom to receive information, an...
Positioning political texts with large language models by asking and averaging
Abstract We use instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Llama 3, MiXtral, or Aya to position political texts within policy and i...
Platform polarization. Do alternative platforms drive discursive polarization?
Published in Comun. Politica | Year: 2025 | Authors: Kristensen, Jakob Bæk, Kristensen, Jakob Bæk
Red-Teaming in the Public Interest
This report offers a vision for red-teaming in the public interest: a process that goes beyond system-centric testing of already built systems to c...
Divergent patterns of engagement with partisan and low-quality news across seven social media platforms
In recent years, social media has become increasingly fragmented, as platforms evolve and new alternatives emerge. Yet most research studies a sing...
The diffusion and reach of (mis)information on Facebook during the U.s. 2020 election
Social media creates the possibility for rapid, viral spread of content, but how many posts actually reach millions? And is misinformation special ...
TikTok ‘dogshows’ and the amplification of online incivility among Gen Z influencers in the Philippines
Studies on digital platforms and online incivility have established that uses of humour can lean towards cyberbullying and hate speech. Focusing on...
IOHunter: Graph foundation model to uncover online information operations
Social media platforms have become vital spaces for public discourse, serving as modern agoràs where a wide range of voices influence societal narr...
Algorithmic media use and algorithm literacy: An integrative literature review
Algorithms profoundly shape user experiences on digital platforms, raising concerns about their negative impacts and highlighting the importance of...
Beyond time delays: How web scraping distorts measures of online news consumption
As the exploration of digital behavioral data revolutionizes communication research, understanding the nuances of data collection methodologies bec...
The sound of disinformation: TikTok, computational propaganda, and the invasion of Ukraine
TikTok has emerged as a powerful platform for the dissemination of mis- and disinformation about the war in Ukraine. During the initial three month...
Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI
Conspiracy theory beliefs are notoriously persistent. Influential hypotheses propose that they fulfill important psychological needs, thus resistin...
Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation
The controversy over online misinformation and social media has opened a gap between public discourse and scientific research. Public intellectuals...
Estimating the ideology of political YouTube videos
Abstract We present a method for estimating the ideology of political YouTube videos. The subfield of estimating ideology as a latent variable has ...
Political science. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook
Exposure to news, opinion, and civic information increasingly occurs through social media. How do these online networks influence exposure to persp...
News & Updates
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August 02, 2025
#toread #paper Ranking authority: A critical audit of YouTube’s content moderation by Jurg, Daniel, Romano, Salvatore, Rieder, Bernhard https://schola...
Read more -
July 29, 2025
#toread #paper Suspicious stories: taking narrative seriously in disinformation research by Neil Sadler https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaf013
Read more
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