Anna Schild interviews Nicola Righetti of University Urbino

In the course of the February 2024 consortium meeting in Thessaloniki, Deutsche Welle's Anna Schild talked to Nicola Righetti of the University Urbino. As in previous talks, we wanted to find out and present in an easy-to-understand, non technical language what the project partners are working on, and which primary outcomes they are expecting. 

One of the key areas of work of the team at University of Urbino (and the respective Mapping Italian News Research Program) is the so-called “detection of coordinated behaviour.” This implies, for example, discovering who is spreading topically related disinformation or narratives on social networks in short periods of time, and possibly with which impact.

According to Nicola, their work started by taking a closer look at how such disinformation spreading activities operate on Facebook and Instagram. This moved to more platforms as time went on.

One expected outcome of the teams' work, in this respect, is to reduce the amount of content that fact-checkers have to check. 

A core challenge overall (as it is for many researchers): gaining access to platform data. 

Find out more about what Nicola had to say in the video below.

Author: Jochen Spangenberg (DW)

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