Research publication

Journal articles

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

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.

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.

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