Fabio Giglietto

As of August 2026, 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, the analysis of digital platforms and political communication, with a particular focus on information disorders and coordinated behaviour on social media. His teaching has included courses on Digital Social Network Analysis and on Generative AI and Media. He is also a founding partner of Digit Srl, a benefit-corporation spin-off of the university that develops digital platforms for sustainability, civic participation, social innovation and scientific dissemination.

In 2017 he founded the Mapping Italian News Research Program (MINE), which he has coordinated since and which, as of August 2026, remains the institutional umbrella for his research. Between 2017 and February 2026 MINE hosted a succession of externally funded sub-projects on Italian media coverage and the effects of social media on elections, public opinion and health information; all 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, since applied internationally by researchers, journalists and fact-checkers. Operational development of CooRnet ended after Meta shut down CrowdTangle, the package's data source, on 14 August 2024, but its methodology continued to inform downstream tools such as CooRTweet, an independent package developed by other researchers.

Giglietto has been closely involved in European research on disinformation and platform governance. He served as Work Package 4 Leader of the Horizon Europe project vera.ai, which developed AI-based tools for countering disinformation and concluded in October 2025, and as partner on PROMPT, a European Commission project monitoring disinformation narratives in Europe that concluded in February 2026. He was 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 Article 40(12) of the Digital Services Act; in that role he provided scientific oversight of the group's projects, monitored the platform data-access request process and authored its summary reports, delivered in 2026. He was also appointed evaluator and rapporteur for the European Education and Culture Executive Agency, an appointment that, as of August 2026, ran to September 2026. As of the same date 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 the International Sociological Association's Research Committee 51.

His recent work examines how platform algorithms and governance decisions shape what audiences see online. A 2025 working paper offered the first independent empirical audit of Meta's political content reduction policy in Italy, finding that it cut re-elected MPs' average per-post reach by 72 per cent at its trough, with only a partial recovery after Meta's 2025 reversal. The paper was cited in a written question to the European Commission and drew national coverage in Il Sole 24 Ore, Il Resto del Carlino, Open and Lumsanews. Across 160 publications and roughly 2,400 citations, his research continues to probe how generative AI, partisan alignment and shifting platform data-access regimes reshape the digital public sphere.