Fabio Giglietto

Fabio Giglietto is Full Professor of Internet Studies at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, where he also earned his doctorate. His research sits at the intersection of computational social science, political communication, and the analysis of digital platforms, with a particular focus on information disorders and coordinated behaviour on social media. His teaching at Urbino has included courses on Generative AI and Media and on Digital Social Network Analysis.

In 2017 he founded the Mapping Italian News Research Program (MINE) at Urbino and has coordinated it since. MINE studies Italian media coverage and the impact of social media on electoral processes, public opinion, and health information, and has hosted a series of externally funded sub-projects. Within MINE he co-developed CooRnet, with Nicola Righetti and Luca Rossi: an open-source R package that introduced the Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior detection method and was applied internationally by researchers, journalists, and fact-checkers. Operational development of CooRnet ended after Meta shut down CrowdTangle, its data source, in August 2024; its methodology lives on in independent tools such as CooRTweet, developed by other researchers. His EU-funded work included serving as Work Package 4 Leader of the Horizon Europe project vera.ai, which concluded in October 2025, and as a partner on PROMPT, a European Commission project monitoring disinformation narratives in Europe that concluded in February 2026.

His 2025 working paper on Meta's political content reduction policy offered the first independent empirical audit of the policy's effect on Italian parliamentarians' Facebook visibility, showing that the policy took effect in Italy roughly ten months before Meta's announced global rollout and cut re-elected MPs' average per-post reach by 72 per cent at its trough. The study was cited in a written question to the European Commission and drew national media coverage in Italy from outlets including Il Sole 24 Ore, Il Resto del Carlino, Open, and Lumsanews.

Beyond the university, he is a founding partner of Digit Srl, a benefit-corporation spin-off of the University of Urbino that develops digital platforms for sustainability, civic participation, social innovation, and scientific dissemination. He is a member of the International Communication Association, the Association of Internet Researchers, and the Italian Association for Political Communication, and has served on the board of Research Committee 51 on Sociocybernetics of the International Sociological Association.