Fabio Giglietto

As of August 2026, Fabio Giglietto is Full Professor of Internet Studies in the Department of Communication Sciences, Humanities and International Studies at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, where he also earned his doctorate. His work sits at the crossroads of computational social science, digital platform analysis and political communication, with particular attention to information disorders and coordinated behaviour on social media. His teaching has included Generative AI and Media and Digital Social Network Analysis. He is a founding partner of Digit Srl, a benefit-corporation spin-off of the university that builds digital tools for sustainability, civic participation, social innovation and science communication.

In 2017 he founded the Mapping Italian News Research Program (MINE) at Urbino and has coordinated it ever since; as of August 2026 it remains the institutional umbrella for his research. MINE examines Italian media coverage and the influence of social media on elections, public opinion and health information, and hosted a succession of externally funded sub-projects, all of which had concluded by February 2026. Within MINE he co-developed CooRnet with Nicola Righetti and Luca Rossi — the open-source R package that introduced the Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior detection method, applied internationally by researchers, journalists and fact-checkers. Operational development of CooRnet ended after Meta shut down CrowdTangle in August 2024, though the methodology it introduced continues to inform independent downstream tools such as CooRTweet. He served 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-funded project on monitoring disinformation narratives that concluded in February 2026.

His 2025 working paper on Meta's political content reduction policy and the Facebook visibility of Italian parliamentarians drew national media coverage in Italy and was cited in a written question to the European Commission submitted through the European Parliament. He has also served the European Commission as an independent expert: as a member of a Joint Research Centre expert group on systemic risks of very large online platforms — a study contributing to the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency under the Digital Services Act — he provided scientific oversight, monitored the platform data-access request process and authored summary reports delivered in 2026. As of August 2026 he held an appointment as evaluator and rapporteur for the European Education and Culture Executive Agency, running to September 2026. 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.