Research publications
Preprint articles
2025. Ashani Amarasinghe, Sascha Nanlohy, Thomas Morgan, David Hammond, Yashdeep Singh Dahiya, Francesco Bailo. Mapping violence perceptions through YouTube comments: A new approach to real-time violence monitoring. SocArXiv. DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/rbfuy_v1
By analyzing millions of geolocated YouTube comments from Mexico, the Violence Perception Index measures how communities discuss and perceive violence—capturing fears, rumors, and local discourse that traditional monitoring systems miss, particularly in remote and marginalized regions.
Peer-reviewed articles
2025. Francesco Marolla, Marilù Miotto, Giovanni Cassani, Francesco Bailo. Affording fragmented audiences: Multi-platform deliberation within the Five Star Movement. Political Communication. DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2025.2548288
This study reveals how multi-platform environments generate fragmented patterns of internal communication and influence within political parties when they progressively increase their exposure to the mediation of digital technologies and provides insights into their broader implications for democracy, given the centrality of parties in elite selection and the functioning of democratic systems.
2025. Milica Stilinovic, Francesco Bailo, Jonathon Hutchinson. Creative Underspheres and democratic challenges: Exploring the implications of generative AI misuse. New Media & Society. DOI: 10.1177/14614448251338511
This article introduces the ‘Undersphere’—creative communities using Generative AI in ways that challenge current policy frameworks and pose emerging risks to democratic values.
2025. Francesco Bailo. Breaking out of legacy mobilization networks: How the Internet reaches and activates the politically disengaged. Journal of Information Technology & Politics. DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2025.2494116
This paper examines how digital media can activate political participation in areas traditionally excluded from social capital networks, focusing on Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S). Using a granular dataset of Meetup.com events, census data, and electoral results between 2005 and 2013, the study explores the relationship between social capital, Internet-enabled mobilization, political participation and votes.
2025. Lin Tian, Emily Booth, Francesco Bailo, Julian Droogan, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu. Before It's Too Late: A State Space Model for the Early Prediction of Misinformation and Disinformation Engagement. WWW '25: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2025. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2502.04655
The paper introduces IC-Mamba, a novel state space model that forecasts social media engagement by modeling interval-censored data with integrated temporal embeddings, enabling early detection of misinformation and disinformation engagement patterns to facilitate proactive countermeasures
2024. Filippo Tronconi, Francesco Bailo. The other side of platform politics. Law-making and online participatory democracy in the Five Star Movement. Swiss Political Science Review. DOI: 10.1111/spsr.12613
Between 2013 and 2021, the Italian Five Star Movement’s Lex Eletti platform aimed to enhance citizens’ online participation in law-making by requiring elected representatives to present draft bills on the party’s platform for discussion and modification by ordinary party members before introducing them in Parliament, but an analysis using text analysis and sentence embeddings revealed that the platform had minimal impact, with limited MP engagement, declining user attention, and most bills reaching Parliament unchanged.
2024. Amelia Johns, Francesco Bailo, Emily Booth, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu. 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?. Media International Australia. DOI: 10.1177/1329878X241236984
This paper evaluates the effectiveness of Meta’s content moderation on Facebook during the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing 18 Australian right-wing/anti-vaccination pages from January 2019 to July 2021, revealing a partial success with inconsistencies and community resistance to moderation tactics.
2023. Francesco Bailo, Amelia Johns, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu. Riding information crises: The performance of far-right Twitter users in Australia during the 2019–2020 bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. Information, Communication & Society. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2023.2205479
This paper focuses on the performance of the far-right community in the Australian Twittersphere during two information crises: the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires and the early months of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
2022. Quyu Kong, Emily Booth, Francesco Bailo, Amelia Johns, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu. Slipping to the extreme: A mixed method to explain how extreme opinions infiltrate online discussions. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. DOI: 10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19312
Qualitative research provides methodological guidelines for observing and studying communities and cultures on online social media platforms.
2021. Francesco Bailo, Benjamin E Goldsmith. No paradox here? Improving theory and testing of the nuclear stability–instability paradox with synthetic counterfactuals. Journal of Peace Research. DOI: 10.1177/00223433211018501
This article contributes to both the theoretical elaboration and empirical testing of the ‘stability–instability paradox’, the proposition that while nuclear weapons deter nuclear war, they also increase conventional conflict among nuclear-armed states.
2021. Francesco Bailo, James Meese, Edward Hurcombe. The institutional impacts of algorithmic distribution: Facebook and the Australian news media. Social Media + Society. DOI: 10.1177/20563051211024963
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 less interested in news.
2018. Gabriele Abbondanza, Francesco Bailo. The electoral payoff of immigration flows for anti-immigration parties: The case of Italy’s Lega Nord. European Political Science. DOI: 10.1057/s41304-016-0097-0
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 Northern regions – from 1992 to 2015 – and in Italy’s forty-five Northern provinces from 2004 to 2015.
2017. Francesco Bailo, Ariadne Vromen. Hybrid social and news media protest events: from #MarchinMarch to #BusttheBudget in Australia. Information, Communication & Society. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2016.1252410
Public protest events are now both social media and news media events.
2016. Ariadne Vromen, Brian D. Loader, Michael A. Xenos, Francesco Bailo. Everyday making through Facebook engagement: Young citizens' political interactions in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Political Studies. DOI: 10.1177/0032321715614012
The emergence of personalised, interactive forms of social media has led to questions about the use of these platforms for engagement in politics.
2015. Francesco Bailo. Mapping online political talks through network analysis: A case study of the website of Italy’s Five Star Movement. Policy Studies. DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2015.1095282
Understanding relations among online users involved in political discussions can help us understand similarities and differences with corresponding offline interactions.
News articles
2025. Francesco Bailo. How can users discern the truth amid AI, fake news and social media?. The Canberra Times.
When the public wants to know information, someone or something fills that void.
2025. Francesco Bailo. Digital platforms are now the ultimate political power brokers, with consequences for democracy. The Conversation.
Behind the scenes, digital platforms fragment public discourse while amplifying cynicism, distrust, and rage-driven engagement.
2025. Milica Stilinovic, Francesco Bailo, Jonathon Hutchinson. AI is moving fast. Climate policy provides valuable lessons for how to keep it in check. The Conversation.
Existing efforts to regulate AI share a limitation: they’re built around intended use, not the messy, creative and often unintended ways it is actually being used.
2025. Francesco Bailo. Concerns over DeepSeek should prompt us to reconsider the data we leave behind on other platforms. ABC Religion & Ethics.
Australia has banned DeepSeek from government devices, but why have similar concerns not been raised about the data collection occurring more broadly through other platforms — and how that data has been used?
2024. Amelia Johns, Francesco Bailo, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu. Meta just closed a vital online research tool. It’s bad news for the fight against misinformation. The Conversation.
CrowdTangle helped researchers and journalists track viral online falsehoods. Its closure in a key election year is dangerous
2024. Amelia Johns, Emily Booth, Francesco Bailo, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu. Conspiracy theorist tactics show it’s too easy to get around Facebook’s content policies. The Conversation.
New research shows that even after Facebook made changes to stem the tide of dangerous pandemic misinformation, some accounts continued to thrive.
2023. Francesco Bailo. Social media and political engagement in the world today. Australian Outlook.
Social media has not lived up to the democratising expectations of liberal Western states. For undemocratic countries, however, the political turbulence from uncontrolled information systems is a potential blaze that must be kept under strict control.
2022. Francesco Bailo, Benjamin E Goldsmith. Ignore the paradox: Russia, Ukraine, and nuclear deterrence. E-International Relations.
There is no empirical evidence that the assumption of emboldened and risk-acceptant conventional conflict behavior of Russia is in some way caused by, or protected by, MAD.
2021. James Meese, Edward Hurcombe, Francesco Bailo. It's complicated: Australian media firms were breaking up with Facebook long before the infamous 2021 news blackout. The Conversation.
Facebook used to be a goldmine for news media companies. But since the tech giant changed its algorithm in 2018, news firms have drifted away from Facebook, particularly digital-native publications.
2021. Francesco Bailo, Benjamin E. Goldsmith. Would denuclearization make North Korea less dangerous?. Political Violence at a Glance.
Guest post by Francesco Bailo and Benjamin E. Goldsmith The Biden administration’s newly disclosed policy towards North Korea…
2019. Francesco Bailo. Il successo della Lega, i media e le crisi migratorie. YouTrend.
Esiste una qualche relazione tra i flussi migratori, l’attenzione dedicata al tema dai media e la crescita della Lega e di Salvini nei sondaggi?
2019. Francesco Bailo. Il voto nelle città: le Europee a Milano. YouTrend.
Le Europee a Milano: frattura tra centro e periferia nel capoluogo lombardo. In particolare, è la circonvallazione esterna a separare PD e Lega.
Reports and submissions
2025. Francesco Bailo, Terry Flew, Rob Nicholls, Daniel Gozman. Submission to the 2025 Review of the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation. URL: https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/34476
This submission proposes that platforms should prevent individual harm through content moderation while contributing to a new persona-based monitoring system that tracks information quality across representative user types, protecting Australians’ right to access reliable information for informed decision-making.
2025. Kimberlee Weatherall, Terry Flew, Francesco Bailo, Kalervo Gulson, Jose-Miguel Bello-Villarino. Submission to the Productivity Commission: Harnessing Data and Digital Technology & Building a Skilled and Adaptable Workforce. URL: https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/34422
The Centre for AI, Trust and Governance challenges the Productivity Commission’s approach to AI regulation, arguing that permissive data sharing without addressing market concentration and power asymmetries will entrench tech monopolies rather than foster Australian innovation or build genuine public trust.
2023. Terry Flew, Chris Chesher, Jonathon Hutchinson, Milica Stilinovic, Francesco Bailo, Joanne Gray, Catharine Lumby, Agata Stepnik, Gerard Goggin, and Justine Humphry. Safe and responsible AI in Australia: Submission paper. URL: https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/31527
In light of the enormous social, economic, political, cultural and ethical challenges presented by rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), and particularly generative artificial intelligence, the opportunity to participate in a policy deliberation process that aims to address questions of the social good at an early stage, and to design suitable regulations to meet such challenges, is very much welcomed.
2017. Gerard Goggin, Ariadne Vromen, Kimberlee Weatherall, Fiona Martin, Webb Adele, Lucy Sunman, and Francesco Bailo. Digital Rights in Australia. URL: https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/17587
At a time when our use of these technologies is increasingly redefining aspects of our personal and professional lives, Digital Rights in Australia explores urgent questions about the nature of our rights now and into the future.
Book
2020. Francesco Bailo. Online communities and crowds in the rise of the Five Star Movement. Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-45508-8
This book reflects on the political capacity of citizen users to impact politics, explaining the danger in assuming that mass online participation has unconditionally democratising effects.
Book sections
2023. Francesco Bailo. Social media. In Maria Grasso, Marco Giugni. Elgar encyclopedia of political sociology. Edward Elgar Publishing. DOI: 10.4337/9781803921235.00146
2023. Kurt Sengul, Francesco Bailo. Twenty-first century populism in Australia and Italy: A comparative analysis. In Gabriele Abbondanza, Simone Battiston. Italy and Australia: Redefining Bilateral Relations for the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1007/978-981-99-3216-0_9