Why AI Governance Needs a Rethink
As AI systems become more powerful and accessible, we’re witnessing a surge in unintended, fringe uses that current regulatory frameworks can’t keep up with....
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Blog
Posts
Meta wants to get politics out of its platforms. Is this good or bad for democracy?
For Meta, politics is bad for business. And for two reasons. First, politically charged content and the toxicity surrounding it do not create an attractive s...
Using r/exams in SSPS4102 Data Analytics in the Social Sciences
In October 2023, I was one of the recipients of the Teaching Innovation Awards of the the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Sydney...
Research Presentations
Mapping violence perceptions through YouTube comments: a new approach to real-time violence monitoring
This paper introduces the Violence Perception Index (VPI), a novel methodology for quantifying violence-related discourse through geolocated YouTube comments...
Presentation @ UNSW 3rd UNSW RESILIENT DEMOCRACY LAB WORKSHOP: Measuring Information Disorder: Concept, Method, and Application to the 2020 US Election
We develop a scalable framework for measuring information disorder without adjudicating truth claims and find that Facebook’s algorithms systematically ampli...
Presentation @ ASQPS 13: Information disorder on Facebook around the 2020 US Presidential election
We develop a scalable framework for measuring information disorder without adjudicating truth claims and find that Facebook’s algorithms systematically ampli...
Presentation @ Uni Trento: Collaborative Use of Wikibase for Interdisciplinary Mixed-Methods Research
Our upcoming book Collaborative Use of Wikibase for Interdisciplinary Mixed-Methods Research outlines how research teams can utilise Wikibase to manage, inte...
Presentation @ Uni Trento: Quantifying Perceptions of Violence on YouTube
This study presents an innovative approach to quantifying perceptions of violence by leveraging geolocated YouTube comments. By developing a granular, spatia...
Presentation @ WSU: Breaking out of Legacy Mobilization Networks
This study explores the Internet’s role in mobilizing outside traditional social capital networks, focusing on Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S) and its use o...
Presentation @ ICA 2024: Affording Fragmented Audiences: Multi-Platform Deliberation Within the Five Star Movement
The online ecosystems of political movements are not confined to single platforms; rather, they span multiple platforms, each offering unique affordances and...
Presentation @ ASQPS 2023: Levelling at the margin: Personal networks, social capital and the Internet in the mobilisation of the Five Star Movement
Focus on personal networks, social capital, and the Internet’s role in mobilising Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S).
Presentation @ APSA 2023: Online and offline social capital as catalyst for political mobilisation
We investigate whether this is the case using responses to an online survey (n = 698) administered to participants at face-to-face meetings organised to supp...
Presentation @ ASNAC 2023: Measuring information disorder
In this paper, I introduce a robust framework for quantifying ‘information disorder’ within diverse information spaces, detailing its measurement methodology...
Conference
Research Presentations
Presentation @ ICA 2024: Affording Fragmented Audiences: Multi-Platform Deliberation Within the Five Star Movement
The online ecosystems of political movements are not confined to single platforms; rather, they span multiple platforms, each offering unique affordances and...
Presentation @ ASQPS 2023: Levelling at the margin: Personal networks, social capital and the Internet in the mobilisation of the Five Star Movement
Focus on personal networks, social capital, and the Internet’s role in mobilising Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S).
Presentation @ APSA 2023: Online and offline social capital as catalyst for political mobilisation
We investigate whether this is the case using responses to an online survey (n = 698) administered to participants at face-to-face meetings organised to supp...
Presentation @ ASNAC 2023: Measuring information disorder
In this paper, I introduce a robust framework for quantifying ‘information disorder’ within diverse information spaces, detailing its measurement methodology...
Information Disorder Project
News Articles
Why the US government shut down Anthropic’s latest Claude AI model
An “export control directive” for Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models highlights the chaotic, fast-changing state of AI regulation.
Why Australia needs a healthier information ecosystem, not just fact-checks
Australia must move beyond fact‑checking alone and focus on building a healthier, more resilient information ecosystem that supports trust, quality informati...
How can users discern the truth amid AI, fake news and social media?
Francesco Bailo. The Canberra Times. 22 December 2025.
R
Posts
Using r/exams in SSPS4102 Data Analytics in the Social Sciences
In October 2023, I was one of the recipients of the Teaching Innovation Awards of the the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Sydney...
Research
Posts
Why AI Governance Needs a Rethink
As AI systems become more powerful and accessible, we’re witnessing a surge in unintended, fringe uses that current regulatory frameworks can’t keep up with....
Meta wants to get politics out of its platforms. Is this good or bad for democracy?
For Meta, politics is bad for business. And for two reasons. First, politically charged content and the toxicity surrounding it do not create an attractive s...
Research-presentation
Research Presentations
Presentation @ SICSS-Melbourne 2026: How to Use Wikibase for Mixed-Methods Research
A hands-on workshop on using Wikibase as a shared ‘digital table’ for interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research — from core concepts and ontology design to b...
Mapping violence perceptions through YouTube comments: a new approach to real-time violence monitoring
This paper introduces the Violence Perception Index (VPI), a novel methodology for quantifying violence-related discourse through geolocated YouTube comments...
Presentation @ UNSW 3rd UNSW RESILIENT DEMOCRACY LAB WORKSHOP: Measuring Information Disorder: Concept, Method, and Application to the 2020 US Election
We develop a scalable framework for measuring information disorder without adjudicating truth claims and find that Facebook’s algorithms systematically ampli...
Presentation @ ASQPS 13: Information disorder on Facebook around the 2020 US Presidential election
We develop a scalable framework for measuring information disorder without adjudicating truth claims and find that Facebook’s algorithms systematically ampli...
Presentation @ Uni Trento: Collaborative Use of Wikibase for Interdisciplinary Mixed-Methods Research
Our upcoming book Collaborative Use of Wikibase for Interdisciplinary Mixed-Methods Research outlines how research teams can utilise Wikibase to manage, inte...
Presentation @ Uni Trento: Quantifying Perceptions of Violence on YouTube
This study presents an innovative approach to quantifying perceptions of violence by leveraging geolocated YouTube comments. By developing a granular, spatia...
Presentation @ WSU: Breaking out of Legacy Mobilization Networks
This study explores the Internet’s role in mobilizing outside traditional social capital networks, focusing on Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S) and its use o...
Presentation @ ICA 2024: Affording Fragmented Audiences: Multi-Platform Deliberation Within the Five Star Movement
The online ecosystems of political movements are not confined to single platforms; rather, they span multiple platforms, each offering unique affordances and...
Presentation @ ASQPS 2023: Levelling at the margin: Personal networks, social capital and the Internet in the mobilisation of the Five Star Movement
Focus on personal networks, social capital, and the Internet’s role in mobilising Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S).
Presentation @ APSA 2023: Online and offline social capital as catalyst for political mobilisation
We investigate whether this is the case using responses to an online survey (n = 698) administered to participants at face-to-face meetings organised to supp...
Presentation @ ASNAC 2023: Measuring information disorder
In this paper, I introduce a robust framework for quantifying ‘information disorder’ within diverse information spaces, detailing its measurement methodology...
Teaching
Posts
Using r/exams in SSPS4102 Data Analytics in the Social Sciences
In October 2023, I was one of the recipients of the Teaching Innovation Awards of the the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Sydney...
TikTok
Posts
Back to Top ↑balkans
Posts
The Dirt Floats
The Kosovo Liberation Army (Albanian acronym UÇK) supposedly run, during the conflict of 1999, torture camps in northern Albania. According to an investigati...
book
Books
How to use Wikibase for Mixed-Methods Research: An Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Approach
This applicable book outlines instructions on how to use Wikibase, a free collaborative platform that enables research teams to manage complex, multimodal da...
Online communities and crowds in the rise of the Five Star Movement
This book reflects on the political capacity of citizen users to impact politics, explaining the danger in assuming that mass online participation has uncond...
book section
Book Sections
Social media
Publisher version Social media are Internet-based technologies and services that allow people to communicate synchronously or asynchronously with one or...
guatemala
Posts
Eyes on Guatemala
The Economist has published an article on malnutrition in Guatemala. Hunger is not new in the country, with half of the children population not eating enough...
Human Rights in Guatemala
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has published the Annual Report 2008 on Guatemala. And hardly could have been worse. Last year murder r...
Wars in the Backyard
The National Security Archive has just declassified eleven documents on the extra judicial arrests conducted 25 years ago by the government of Guatemala. It ...
Crisis from the South /3
The Inter-American Development Bank publishes today on its web-site previsions for remittance flows in 2009 to Latin America: they will go down for the first...
Truth, finally. Maybe
Guatemalan newspaper La Hora affirms that, for the first time, the government will hand to the ministerio público (attorney general) the military archives r...
Crisis from the South
According to Banco de Guatemala, for the first time since 1999, in January 2009 remittances from abroad decreased by 7.75% compared to the same month in 2008...
how-to
Posts
How to sync your Zotero library (and files) with WebDAV
In this post, I explain how to use an online file storing and sharing service like AARNet’s CloudStor (but any WebDAV service will do) to access and update y...
internet
Posts
The two alternatives to the monasterisation of the World wide web
Saint Michael's Abbey, in the Susa Valley, Piedmont. Source: Wikipedia
italian-european-election-2019
Posts
Il voto per le europee a Milano
La geografia socio-politica delle grandi città italiane del centro-nord è radicalmente cambiata negli ultimi 25 anni. Se osserviamo la distribuzione dei voti...
italian-general-election-2018
Posts
Local participation and not unemployment explains the M5S result in the South
The abundance of economic data and the scarcity of social data with a comparable level of granularity is a problem for the quantitative analysis of social ph...
2018 Italian general election: Details on my simulation
This simulation of the results for the 2018 general election is based on the results from the last two national elections (the Italian parliament election in...
m5s
Posts
Local participation and not unemployment explains the M5S result in the South
The abundance of economic data and the scarcity of social data with a comparable level of granularity is a problem for the quantitative analysis of social ph...
Quick analysis of the Italian referendum results
The 2016 Italian referendum torpedoed the constitutional reform presented by the government presided by Matteo Renzi (41). According to the final count, whic...
Cosa possiamo imparare dal M5S
Leggo e rispondo al post di Massimo Mantellini (Il M5S, il wifi e il principio di precauzione) in cui si evidenzia con preoccupazione come il Movimento abbia...
Road to Rome: The organisational and political success of the M5S
The Five Star Movement (M5S) obtained two major victories in the second round of municipal elections on 19 June 2016 in Rome and Turin. Rome attracted the mo...
Italy’s Five Star Movement - a spectral analysis of its political composition
To talk about identity and soul of the Five Star Movement (M5S) is not only politically contentious but also practically challenging because of the different...
media-appearance
Posts
Back to Top ↑news-article
Posts
The Conversation: Digital platforms are now the ultimate political power brokers, with consequences for democracy Permalink
The Conversation: AI is moving fast. Climate policy provides valuable lessons for how to keep it in check Permalink
ABC Religion & Ethics: Concerns over DeepSeek should prompt us to reconsider the data we leave behind on other platforms Permalink
peer-reviewed journal article
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Mapping violence perceptions through YouTube comments: a new approach to real-time violence monitoring
This paper introduces the Violence Perception Index (VPI), a novel methodology for quantifying violence-related discourse through geolocated YouTube comments...
Affording fragmented audiences: Multi-platform deliberation within the Five Star Movement
This study reveals how multi-platform environments generate fragmented patterns of internal communication and influence within political parties when they pr...
Creative Underspheres and democratic challenges: Exploring the implications of generative AI misuse
This article introduces the ‘Undersphere’—creative communities using Generative AI in ways that challenge current policy frameworks and pose emerging risks t...
Breaking out of legacy mobilization networks: How the Internet reaches and activates the politically disengaged
This paper examines how digital media can activate political participation in areas traditionally excluded from social capital networks, focusing on Italy’s ...
Before It’s Too Late: A State Space Model for the Early Prediction of Misinformation and Disinformation Engagement
The paper introduces IC-Mamba, a novel state space model that forecasts social media engagement by modeling interval-censored data with integrated temporal e...
The other side of platform politics. Law-making and online participatory democracy in the Five Star Movement
Between 2013 and 2021, the Italian Five Star Movement’s Lex Eletti platform aimed to enhance citizens’ online participation in law-making by requiring electe...
Labelling, shadow bans and community resistance: Did Meta’s strategy to suppress rather than remove COVID misinformation and conspiracy theory on Facebook slow the spread?
This paper evaluates the effectiveness of Meta’s content moderation on Facebook during the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing 18 Australian right-wing/anti-vaccina...
Riding information crises: The performance of far-right Twitter users in Australia during the 2019–2020 bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic
This paper focuses on the performance of the far-right community in the Australian Twittersphere during two information crises: the 2019–2020 Australian bush...
Slipping to the extreme: A mixed method to explain how extreme opinions infiltrate online discussions
Qualitative research provides methodological guidelines for observing and studying communities and cultures on online social media platforms.
No paradox here? Improving theory and testing of the nuclear stability–instability paradox with synthetic counterfactuals
This article contributes to both the theoretical elaboration and empirical testing of the ‘stability–instability paradox’, the proposition that while nuclear...
The institutional impacts of algorithmic distribution: Facebook and the Australian news media
Since changing its algorithm in January 2018 to boost the content of family and friends over other content (including news), Facebook has signaled that it is...
The electoral payoff of immigration flows for anti-immigration parties: The case of Italy’s Lega Nord
The aim of this article is to examine and quantify the relationship between regular immigration and voting for anti-immigration parties in Italy’s eight Nort...
Hybrid social and news media protest events: from #MarchinMarch to #BusttheBudget in Australia
Public protest events are now both social media and news media events.
Everyday making through Facebook engagement: Young citizens’ political interactions in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States
The emergence of personalised, interactive forms of social media has led to questions about the use of these platforms for engagement in politics.
Mapping online political talks through network analysis: A case study of the website of Italy’s Five Star Movement
Understanding relations among online users involved in political discussions can help us understand similarities and differences with corresponding offline i...
podcast
Posts
preprint-article
Preprint Articles
Mapping violence perceptions through YouTube comments: A new approach to real-time violence monitoring
By analyzing millions of geolocated YouTube comments from Mexico, the Violence Perception Index measures how communities discuss and perceive violence—captur...
presentation
Posts
r
Posts
recogeo: A new R package to reconcile changing geographic boundaries (and corresponding variables)
Demographics information is usually reported in relation to precise boundaries: administrative, electoral, statistical, etc. Comparing demographics informati...
Are you parallelizing your raster operations? You should!
If you plan to do anything with the raster package you should definitely consider parallelize all your processes, especially if you are working with very lar...
Explicit semantic analysis with R
Explicit semantic analysis (ESA) was proposed by Gabrilovich and Markovitch (2007) to compute a document position in a high-dimensional concept space. At the...
research report
Research Reports
Submission to the 2025 Review of the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation
This submission proposes that platforms should prevent individual harm through content moderation while contributing to a new persona-based monitoring system...
Submission to the Productivity Commission: Harnessing Data and Digital Technology & Building a Skilled and Adaptable Workforce
The Centre for AI, Trust and Governance challenges the Productivity Commission’s approach to AI regulation, arguing that permissive data sharing without addr...
Safe and responsible AI in Australia: Submission paper
In light of the enormous social, economic, political, cultural and ethical challenges presented by rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), and pa...
Digital Rights in Australia
At a time when our use of these technologies is increasingly redefining aspects of our personal and professional lives, Digital Rights in Australia explores ...
risk-assessment
Posts
NDVI, risk assessment and developing countries
The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) estimates the greenness of plants covering the surface of the Earth by measuring the light reflected by the...
south
Posts
Back into Poverty
Increase in food prices has pushed back into poverty at least 100 million people in 2008 and, according to the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition...
Selva Amazónica, More Valuable Standing Than Felled
An article published on Science this week analyzes the development of the region across the Amazon deforestation frontier. In three words: boom and bust. It ...
If the Asian Growth Model is not Working Anymore
In 1981 poverty rate in China was 64% of the population, in 2004 the rate was 10%: it means that 500 million people stepped out of poverty (look here and her...
Economic Gains Do Not Mean Political Gains
In this post Dani Rodrik explains why trade theories suggest that the U.S. should liberalize trade for agricultural products (especially cotton and sugar) an...
WikiPrices
Let’s try to imagine how a platform to collect and share market price information could work in a country where 46% of the children are malnourished and 80% ...
Hard Numbers, Hard Times
In a report published today, Oxfam predicts that by 2015 the average number of people affected by climate-related disasters every year will increase by 54%. ...
Information Flows on Mobiles
The idea to use mobile phones (here and here) to help economic development in the most remote corners of the world is fascinating and definitely smart. For o...
Understanding Capitalism
Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen argues, in an article published on The New York Review of Books, that the way out from the crisis passes through a better...
Detained and Dismissed
Human Rights Watch has just published a detailed report on Women’s Struggles to Obtain Health Care in United States Immigration Detention. Immigration detent...
Brain matters
Saying that education strengths economic growth sounds good old common sense. But proving and measuring this relation is not immediate and therefore interest...
Crisis from the South /3
The Inter-American Development Bank publishes today on its web-site previsions for remittance flows in 2009 to Latin America: they will go down for the first...
Crisis from the South /2
And it appears that the problem is not just limited to remittances. According to The Institute of International Finance, private financial flows from rich c...
tech
Posts
On the Evolution of Thinking
What if we are becoming the very same Artificial Intelligence that we are trying to design? The doubt has has been raised by Nicholas Carr in an article publ...
video
Posts
Media Appearances
ABC News Hour
Joe O’Brien. ABC News Hour. 6 May 2024.
social media
Posts
Social media is not like cigarettes or alcohol
1 minute read
The Australian government has just announced its intention to ban social media for children and early teens. Social media is then added to a list of restrict...