About
86
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Introduction
My research investigates information and misinformation spreading, social dynamics, and the emergence of collective narratives online. I collected several papers on this topic, both with national and international co-authors. Since 2019, I have been serving as an External Expert to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in the Working Group "Social Research Methods and Advice". In 2020, I joined the Task Force “Data Science” at AGCOM, the Italian Italian Communications Regulatory Authority.
Additional affiliations
November 2020 - October 2023
February 2018 - October 2020
February 2018 - present
Center for the Humanities and Social Change
Position
- Research Associate
Education
October 2010 - May 2013
Publications
Publications (86)
Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, in such a disintermediated environment misinformation is pervasive and attempts to debunk are often undertaken to contrast this trend. In this work, we examine the effectiveness of debunking on Facebook through a quantitative an...
Users polarization and confirmation bias play a key role in misinformation spreading on online social media. Our aim is to use this information to determine in advance potential targets for hoaxes and fake news. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for promptly identifying polarizing content on social media and, thus, "predicting" future...
Online debates are often characterised by extreme polarisation and heated discussions among users. The presence of hate speech online is becoming increasingly problematic, making necessary the development of appropriate countermeasures. In this work, we perform hate speech detection on a corpus of more than one million comments on YouTube videos th...
Climate change and political polarization are two of the twenty-first century’s critical socio-political issues. Here we investigate their intersection by studying the discussion around the United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP) using Twitter data from 2014 to 2021. First, we reveal a large increase in ideological polariza...
One of the most pressing challenges in the digital media landscape is understanding the impact of biases on the news sources that people rely on for information. Biased news can have significant and far-reaching consequences, influencing our perspectives and shaping the decisions we make, potentially endangering the public and individual well-being...
The public understanding of climate change plays a critical role in translating climate science into climate action. In the public discourse, climate impacts are often discussed in the context of extreme weather events. Here, we analyse 65 million Twitter posts and 240 thousand news media articles related to 18 major hurricanes from 2010 to 2022 to...
In 2021 the “Red Covid,” narrative emerged: states and counties that are predominantly Republican and/or supported Trump experienced widespread vaccine hesitancy and eventually opposed mask and vaccine mandates. Our analysis of excess mortality quantifies this effect. After the first wave, death rates in the South were more than double those in the...
The issue of vaccine hesitancy has posed a significant challenge during the Covid-19 pandemic, as it increases the risk of undermining public health interventions aimed at mitigating the spread of the virus. While the swift development of vaccines represents a remarkable scientific achievement, it has also contributed to skepticism and apprehension...
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) carried out preparatory work to inform an EU awareness‐raising communication campaign on plant health risks. In a first phase, this included social science research and audience segmentation to inform appropriate choices regarding targeting and topics to be covered. Mixed methods research was carried out –...
The public understanding of climate change plays a critical role in translating climate science into climate action. In the public discourse, climate impacts are often discussed in the context of extreme weather events. Here, we analyse 65 million Twitter posts and 240 thousand news media articles related to 18 major hurricanes from 2010 to 2022 to...
A "two Americas" narrative emerged in the summer of 2021: one with high demand for COVID-19 vaccines, and a second with widespread vaccine hesitancy and opposition to mask mandates. But our analysis of excess mortality shows that the U.S. has been a divided nation at least since the start of the pandemic. Through April, 2022, there were 1,335,292 e...
Social-media research has advanced insight into topics such as the spread of misinformation and how to counter it, but several factors undermine the field’s validity and feasibility.
Many studies, particularly those testing interventions, are almost impossible to replicate independently because they are so expensive (see J. Roozenbeek et al. Sci....
The COVID-19 pandemic made explicit the issues of communicating science in an information ecosystem dominated by social media platforms. One of the fundamental communication challenges of our time is to provide the public with reliable content and contrast misinformation. This paper investigates how social media can become an effective channel to p...
Hate speech annotation for training machine learning models is an inherently ambiguous and subjective task. In this paper, we adopt a perspectivist approach to data annotation, model training and evaluation for hate speech classification. We first focus on the annotation process and argue that it drastically influences the final data quality. We th...
EFSA undertook consumer research on nutrition and dietary sugars awareness, knowledge and risk perception, preferred information sources and trust in different actors, plus additional research on stakeholder perspectives. The research results informed EFSA’s communications and engagement for a public consultation on its draft scientific assessment...
Climate change and political polarisation are two of the 21st century's critical social and political issues. However, their interaction remains understudied. Here, we investigate the online discussion around the UN Conference of The Parties on Climate Change (COP) using Twitter data from 2014 to 2021. First, we reveal a large increase in ideologic...
In the new digital ecosystem, consumers are overwhelmed with information, sometimes unreliable, and participate in the public debate through social media based on their perceptions and beliefs. For these reasons, the monitoring of social media has become an essential and powerful tool for understanding dynamically and in real-time the information s...
The COVID-19 information epidemic, or “infodemic,” demonstrates how unlimited access to information may confuse and influence behaviors during a health emergency. However, the study of infodemics is relatively new, and little is known about their relationship with epidemics management. Here, we discuss unresolved issues and propose research directi...
Reply to Comment on “The COVID-19 infodemic does not affect vaccine acceptance”, appeared on OSF preprints, on July 23, 2021 by Gallotti et al.
How does information consumption affect behaviour in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic? A popular hypothesis states that the so-called infodemics has substantial impact on orienting individual decisions. A competing hypothesis stresses that exposure to vast amounts of even contradictory information has little effect on personal choices. We analy...
Online debates are often characterised by extreme polarisation and heated discussions among users. The presence of hate speech online is becoming increasingly problematic, making necessary the development of appropriate countermeasures. In this work, we perform hate speech detection on a corpus of more than one million comments on YouTube videos th...
Although the need to improve quality of science communication is often mentioned in public discussions, the science communication literature offers few conceptualizations of quality. We used a concept mapping approach, involving representatives of various science communication stakeholder groups working collaboratively, to propose a framework of qu...
The promotion of quality is a critical aspect to consider in the re-examination of science communication. This problem is analysed in the research carried out by the QUEST project, as featured in this paper. Engaging key stakeholders in a codesign process — through interviews, focus groups, workshops and surveys — the research identified barriers t...
European science communication project QUEST surveyed and reviewed different aspects of European science communication, including science journalism, teaching and training in science communication, social media activity, and science in museums. This article draws together themes that collectively emerge from this research to present an overview of...
In 2018, EFSA received a request for a scientific opinion from the European Parliament on the science
behind the development of an integrated holistic approach for the risk assessment of multiple stressors
in managed honey bees (MUST-B). The inclusion of the need to take into account bee management
practices in the Terms of Reference of the request...
This report assesses peer-reviewed and grey literature on risk communication concepts and practices, as requested by the European Commission to support the implementation of a 'General Plan for Risk Communication', i.e. an integrated framework for EU food safety risk assessors and risk managers at Union and national level, as required by the revise...
The scientific report on Technical assistance in the field of risk communication assesses peer-reviewed and grey literature on risk communication concepts and practices, as requested by the European Commission to support the implementation of a ‘General Plan for Risk Communication’, i.e. an integrated framework for EU food safety risk assessors and...
Efficient HPC libraries often expose multiple tunable parameters, algorithmic implementations, or a combination of them, to provide optimized routines. The optimal parameters and algorithmic choices may depend on input properties such as the shapes of the matrices involved in the operation. Traditionally, these parameters are manually tuned or set...
This (draft) report assesses peer-reviewed and grey literature on risk communication concepts and practices, as requested by the European Commission to support the implementation of a 'General Plan for Risk Communication', i.e. an integrated framework for EU food safety risk assessors and risk managers at Union and national level, as required by th...
Efficient HPC libraries often expose multiple tunable parameters, algorithmic implementations or a combination of them, to provide optimized routines. The optimal parameters and algorithmic choices may depend on input properties such as the shapes of the matrices involved in the operation. Traditionally, these parameters are manually tuned or set b...
We address the diffusion of information about the COVID-19 with a massive data analysis on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Gab. We analyze engagement and interest in the COVID-19 topic and provide a differential assessment on the evolution of the discourse on a global scale for each platform and their users. We fit information spreading wit...
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
Recent studies have shown that online users tend to select information that adheres to their system of beliefs, ignore information that does not, and join groups that share a common narrative. This information environment can elicit tribalism instead of informed debate, especially when issues are controversial. Algorithmic solutions, fact-checking...
In this report we present such a framework of quality, consisting of 12 indicators that can be used to assess quality in various strands of science communication. The results are based on co-design sessions with science communication stakeholders, thus representing the views and quality expectations of the science communication community.
The social brain hypothesis approximates the total number of social relationships we are able to maintain at 150. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information...
The massive diffusion of social media fosters disintermediation and changes the way users are informed, the way they process reality, and the way they engage in public debate. The cognitive layer of users and the related social dynamics define the nature and the dimension of informational threats. Users show the tendency to interact with informatio...
Recent studies, targeting Facebook, showed the tendency of users to interact with information adhering to their preferred narrative and to ignore dissenting information. Primarily driven by confirmation bias, users tend to join homogeneous and polarized clusters (i.e., echo chambers) where they cooperate to frame and reinforce a like-minded
system...
Recent studies, targeting Facebook, showed the tendency of users to interact with information adhering to their preferred narrative and to ignore dissenting information. Primarily driven by confirmation bias, users tend to join homogeneous and polarized clusters (i.e., echo chambers) where they cooperate to frame and reinforce a like-minded system...
Abstract The advent of the internet and social networks has revolutionised the information space and changed the way in which we communicate and get informed. On the internet, a huge amount of information competes for our (limited) attention. Moreover, despite the increasing quantity of contents, quality may be poor, making the environment particul...
This paper presents selected highlights from the ‘Engaging with society’ session of EFSA's third Scientific Conference ‘Science, Food and Society’ (Parma, Italy, 18–21 September 2018). The social dimension for scientific advisory bodies largely concerns science communication and public engagement. The political, economic and technological transform...
L’avvento di internet ha rivoluzionato il modo in cui comunichiamo e ci informiamo. Svanite le barriere spaziali e temporali, possiamo accedere a una pressoché infinita massa d’informazioni in modo facile e istantaneo. Nonostante l’entusiasta retorica sull’intelligenza collettiva, e tradendo le aspettative di molti, la Rete è anche terreno fertile...
According to the World Economic Forum, the diffusion of unsubstantiated rumors on online social media is one of the main threats for our society. The disintermediated paradigm of content production and consumption on online social media might foster the formation of homogeneous communities (echo-chambers) around specific worldviews. Such a scenario...
The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such a...
Social media enabled a direct path from producer to consumer of contents changing the way users get informed, debate, and shape their worldviews. Such a disintermediation might weaken consensus on social relevant issues in favor of rumors, mistrust, or conspiracy thinking-e.g., chem-trails inducing global warming, the link between vaccines and auti...
Users online tend to select information that support and adhere their beliefs, and to form polarized groups sharing the same view-e.g. echo chambers. Algorithms for content promotion may favour this phenomenon, by accounting for users preferences and thus limiting the exposure to unsolicited contents. To shade light on this question, we perform a c...
Recent findings showed that users on Facebook tend to select information that adhere to their system of beliefs and to form polarized groups-i.e., echo chambers. Such a tendency dominates information cascades and might affect public debates on social relevant issues. In this work we explore the structural evolution of communities of interest by acc...
Despite the scientific evidences, anthropogenic climate change is still a strongly controversial subject. Since the subject is relevant for the well-being of future generations, it should be discussed on a neutral ground; however, denial campaigns in many nations enhance the polarization on the subject and often opposite views are linked to differe...
Social media are pervaded by unsubstantiated or untruthful rumors, that contribute to the alarming phenomenon of misinformation. The widespread presence of a heterogeneous mass of information sources may affect the mechanisms behind the formation of public opinion. Such a scenario is a florid environment for digital wildfires when combined with fun...
The rising attention to the spreading of fake news and unsubstantiated rumors on online social media and the pivotal role played by confirmation bias led researchers to investigate different aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental evidence shows that confirmatory information gets accepted even if containing deliberately false claims, while dissenti...
The social brain hypothesis fixes to 150 the number of social relationships we are able to maintain. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility up to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information we can ac...
The social brain hypothesis fixes to 150 the number of social relationships we are able to maintain. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility up to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information we can ac...
Users’ polarization and confirmation bias play a key role in misinformation spreading on online social media. Our aim is to use this information to determine in advance potential targets for hoaxes and fake news. In this article, we introduce a framework for promptly identifying polarizing content on social media and, thus, “predicting” future fake...
The Internet provides fast and ubiquitous communication that enables all kinds of communities and provides citizens with easy access to vast amounts of information, although the information is not necessarily verified and may present a distorted view of real events or facts. The Internet’s power as an instant source of mass information can be used...
The Internet provides fast and ubiquitous communication that enables all kinds of communities and provides citizens with easy access to vast amounts of information, although the information is not necessarily verified and may present a distorted view of real events or facts. The Internet’s power as an instant source of mass information can be used...
The claim of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, that it was possible to influence voting behavior by using data mined from the social platform Facebook created a sudden fear in its users of being manipulated; consequently, even the market price of the social platform was shocked.We propose a case study analyzing the effect of this da...
The consumption of a wide and heterogeneous mass of information sources on social media may affect the mechanisms behind the formation of public opinion. Nowadays social media are pervaded by unsubstantiated or untruthful rumors, which contribute to the alarming phenomenon of misinformation. Indeed, such a scenario represents a florid environment f...
The advent of WWW changed the way we can produce and access information. Recent studies showed that users tend to select information that is consistent with their system of beliefs, forming polarized groups of like-minded people around shared narratives where dissenting information is ignored. In this environment, users cooperate to frame and reinf...
Users polarization and confirmation bias play a key role in misinformation spreading on online social media. Our aim is to use this information to determine in advance potential targets for hoaxes and fake news. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for promptly identifying polarizing content on social media and, thus, "predicting" future...
