Nicola Righetti
Biographic Data
| ID | 328441 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicola Righetti |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicola |
| FAMILY NAME | Righetti |
| SIGNATURE | RIGHETTI N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Vienna |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9257-5113 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 36 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Multi-platform research in the light of technology affordances
This study investigates the varying structures of German far-right networks on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Telegram. Network analyses reveal platform-specific structures and dynamics. Twitter hosts the largest, rather loosely connected network, facilitating rapid content dissemination. Telegram is characterized by inward-focused communication with high clustering and overlapping communities. Facebook displays a hierarchical structu…
Ambient Amplification
Over the last decade, the rise of memetic media in combination with multimodal platform environments have radically transformed our experience of digital culture. On TikTok, gestures and sounds go viral. Twitter (X) @tags operate as bonding tools and ignite ‘supercharged’ critical publics. Coordinated link-sharing and attention-hijacking drive cross-platform engagement. Narratives promoted by state institutions become part of the global digital c…
Transformative Tools, Emerging Challenges
Advancements in Large Language Models have been showing important research opportunities within the field of communication studies. It offers the capacity to conduct large-scale content classification and annotation with low computational expertise and reduced manual coding efforts, potentially allowing more possibilities for researchers in social sciences to explore understudied topics (Bail, 2023; Chang et al., 2024). Because of its functioning…
Mainstreaming and transnationalization of anti-gender ideas through social media
Social media platforms can be effective tools for mainstreaming and transnationalization of radical positions. Anti-gender ideas have particularly gained traction transnationally in recent years. Despite extensive research on the anti-gender movement, the specific role of social media remains underexplored. How do anti-gender organizations use social media to strategically mainstream and transnationalize their agenda? This study addresses this ov…
Waves of Attention to Racial Injustice on Social Media
The deaths of Black victims of police brutality, such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile, have become focusing events and symbols for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, catalyzing wide-spread public attention to racial injustice. While prior studies on hashtag activism predominantly focus on single and widely known cases, less is understood about why some incidents draw massive public attention while others do…
Rethinking Veganism in the Digital Age. Innovating Methodology and Typology to Explore a Decade of Facebook Discourses
In this article, we examine the expressions of veganism on Facebook, a main social media platform worldwide, through a combination of classic qualitative social science and computational methods. Building on a foundational typology proposed by Jessica Greenebaum, we adopt Weber's 'ideal types' to analyze a broad range of online vegan expressions, using Max Reinert's algorithm to identify distinct 'lexical worlds' of vegan discourses in 200,000 ve…
Protest and repression on social media
In this study, we examine connective protest mobilization and suppression during the 2021 protests in Russia. We use time series analysis to study the dynamic interplay between the pro-Navalny movement and pro-government countermovement on Twitter, complemented by network analyses of co-retweeting networks to assess the movements’ coordination patterns. Findings show that pro-Navalny accounts were more active and coordinated within more centraliz…
Pandemic Politics
One of the effects of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic has been to further accelerate the incorporation of social media activities into political and electoral campaigning. Especially as a result of lockdowns and other restrictions to offline public life, overall social media use has increased in many countries; health concerns have severely curtailed conventional in-person political campaigning activities, from doorknocking to mass rallies (even…
Revisiting Key Concepts in Digital Media Research
Recent scholarship on the intersections between digital media and political debate has taken on a decidedly pessimistic, even dystopian tone, and not without reason: from the effective use of social media platforms by populists and demagogues like Donald Trump to the expression of deepening ideological divides in online public debate, and from the emergence of partisan online communities and platforms to the intensification and exploitation of su…
Right-Wing Populism and Political Instrumentalization of Religion
The study investigates the online debate sparked by the political instrumentalization of religious symbols by right-wing populist leaders, taking as a case study the campaign communication of Matteo Salvini—leader of the Italian “Lega” party—in the run-up to the 2018 and 2019 general and European elections. Against the backdrop of theories on populism, religious publicization and politicization in a social media context, the research analyzes ove…
At the onset of an infodemic
This paper analyzes the literature on problematic COVID-19 information published at the onset of the pandemic in 2020. It explores how scientific research has addressed this issue from a disciplinary, methodological and substantive perspective in different world regions. Three hundred seventy-eight articles were analyzed using content analysis and computational methods, including social network analysis and text mining. The study revealed a multi…
Into the Belly of the Beast
In this paper we present some preliminary findings from an ongoing research on a comprehensive corpus of 378 interdisciplinary studies about misinformation and COVID-19 published in 2020, focusing on the role of social media platforms in spreading and countering mis- and disinformation. We followed the PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews to collect and screen results, and a coding scheme based on methodological and substantive questions to a…
Coornet
As much as the field of mis/disinformation studies flourished during the last few years, the efforts to measure its prevalence and effects are often hindered or significantly limited by the fuzziness of the phenomenon under study. Differently from approaches based on sole content or actors detection, the authors implement an integrated approach to understand the interplay between manipulative actors, deceptive behavior, and harmful content. To do…
Four years of fake news
Since 2016, “fake news” has been the main buzzword for online misinformation and disinformation. This term has been widely used and discussed by scholars, leading to hundreds of publications in a few years. This report provides a quantitative analysis of the scientific literature on this topic by using frequency analysis of metadata and automated lexical analysis of 2,368 scientific documents retrieved from Scopus, a large scientific database, me…
Blurred Shots
This article aims at exploring a case of information crisis in Italy through the lens of vaccination-related topics. Such a controversial issue, dividing public opinion and political agendas, has received diverse information coverage and public policies over time in the Italian context, whose situation appears quite unique compared with other countries because of a strong media spectacularization and politicization of the topic. In particular, ap…
(Nearly) Ten Years of Social Media and Political Elections in Italy
In this article, we reconstruct the academic discourse surrounding social media and elections in an Italian context. We follow Neumayer and Rossi's conceptualization of academic discourse concerning political protest and digital technology as constructed out of three components: (a) the social phenomena under investigation, (b) technological development, and (c) methods and techniques. In the context of social media and elections, these three com…
Detecting Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior on Facebook During the Italian Coronavirus Outbreak
Social media, as many scholars have shown, can be used to influence political behavior through coordinated disinformation campaigns in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens. With a specific reference to Facebook, a recent study has spotlighted patterns of coordinated activity aimed at fueling online circulation of specific news stories before the 2018 and 2019 Italian elections, an activity called by the authors “Coordinated Link Sha…
It takes a village to manipulate the media
Over the last few years, a proliferation of attempts to define, understand and fight the spread of problematic information in contemporary media ecosystems emerged. Most of these attempts focus on false content and/or bad actors detection. In this paper, we argue for a wider ecological focus. Using the frame of media manipulation and a revised version of the ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ original definition, the paper presents a study based …
Diverging patterns of interaction around news on social media
The paper considers how social media ecologies are affecting partisan engagement around political news and online attention economies by investigating the case of the 2018 Italian general election. By analyzing Twitter and Facebook interactions around political news in the lead-up to the election, we shed light on levels of insularity characterizing sources preferred by different partisan communities and investigate how specific patterns of activ…
Le forme materiali della vita religiosa
Come cambiano le funzioni e le forme degli oggetti sacri? Quali loro caratteristiche rimangono costanti, tanto da apparire come tipiche del sacro stesso? Le trasformazioni della modernità, che hanno portato da una sacralità eteronoma a una più autonoma, offrono l'opportunità di osservare variazioni ed elementi di continuità di questi aspetti essenziali del fenomeno. Il volume indaga tali temi, mostrando come la cultura materiale, nei suoi aspetti…
It takes a village to manipulate the media
Over the last few years, a proliferation of attempts to define, understand and fight the spread of problematic information in contemporary media ecosystems emerged. Most of these attempts focus on false content and/or bad actors detection. In this paper, we argue for a wider ecological focus. Using the frame of media manipulation and a revised version of the ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ original definition, the paper presents a study based …
Protest and repression on social media
In this study, we examine connective protest mobilization and suppression during the 2021 protests in Russia. We use time series analysis to study the dynamic interplay between the pro-Navalny movement and pro-government countermovement on Twitter, complemented by network analyses of co-retweeting networks to assess the movements’ coordination patterns. Findings show that pro-Navalny accounts were more active and coordinated within more centraliz…
Rethinking Veganism in the Digital Age. Innovating Methodology and Typology to Explore a Decade of Facebook Discourses
In this article, we examine the expressions of veganism on Facebook, a main social media platform worldwide, through a combination of classic qualitative social science and computational methods. Building on a foundational typology proposed by Jessica Greenebaum, we adopt Weber's 'ideal types' to analyze a broad range of online vegan expressions, using Max Reinert's algorithm to identify distinct 'lexical worlds' of vegan discourses in 200,000 ve…
Blurred Shots
This article aims at exploring a case of information crisis in Italy through the lens of vaccination-related topics. Such a controversial issue, dividing public opinion and political agendas, has received diverse information coverage and public policies over time in the Italian context, whose situation appears quite unique compared with other countries because of a strong media spectacularization and politicization of the topic. In particular, ap…
(Nearly) Ten Years of Social Media and Political Elections in Italy
In this article, we reconstruct the academic discourse surrounding social media and elections in an Italian context. We follow Neumayer and Rossi's conceptualization of academic discourse concerning political protest and digital technology as constructed out of three components: (a) the social phenomena under investigation, (b) technological development, and (c) methods and techniques. In the context of social media and elections, these three com…
Diverging patterns of interaction around news on social media
The paper considers how social media ecologies are affecting partisan engagement around political news and online attention economies by investigating the case of the 2018 Italian general election. By analyzing Twitter and Facebook interactions around political news in the lead-up to the election, we shed light on levels of insularity characterizing sources preferred by different partisan communities and investigate how specific patterns of activ…
Le forme materiali della vita religiosa
Come cambiano le funzioni e le forme degli oggetti sacri? Quali loro caratteristiche rimangono costanti, tanto da apparire come tipiche del sacro stesso? Le trasformazioni della modernità, che hanno portato da una sacralità eteronoma a una più autonoma, offrono l'opportunità di osservare variazioni ed elementi di continuità di questi aspetti essenziali del fenomeno. Il volume indaga tali temi, mostrando come la cultura materiale, nei suoi aspetti…
Detecting Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior on Facebook During the Italian Coronavirus Outbreak
Social media, as many scholars have shown, can be used to influence political behavior through coordinated disinformation campaigns in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens. With a specific reference to Facebook, a recent study has spotlighted patterns of coordinated activity aimed at fueling online circulation of specific news stories before the 2018 and 2019 Italian elections, an activity called by the authors “Coordinated Link Sha…
It takes a village to manipulate the media
Over the last few years, a proliferation of attempts to define, understand and fight the spread of problematic information in contemporary media ecosystems emerged. Most of these attempts focus on false content and/or bad actors detection. In this paper, we argue for a wider ecological focus. Using the frame of media manipulation and a revised version of the ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ original definition, the paper presents a study based …
Into the Belly of the Beast
In this paper we present some preliminary findings from an ongoing research on a comprehensive corpus of 378 interdisciplinary studies about misinformation and COVID-19 published in 2020, focusing on the role of social media platforms in spreading and countering mis- and disinformation. We followed the PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews to collect and screen results, and a coding scheme based on methodological and substantive questions to a…
Coornet
As much as the field of mis/disinformation studies flourished during the last few years, the efforts to measure its prevalence and effects are often hindered or significantly limited by the fuzziness of the phenomenon under study. Differently from approaches based on sole content or actors detection, the authors implement an integrated approach to understand the interplay between manipulative actors, deceptive behavior, and harmful content. To do…
Four years of fake news
Since 2016, “fake news” has been the main buzzword for online misinformation and disinformation. This term has been widely used and discussed by scholars, leading to hundreds of publications in a few years. This report provides a quantitative analysis of the scientific literature on this topic by using frequency analysis of metadata and automated lexical analysis of 2,368 scientific documents retrieved from Scopus, a large scientific database, me…
Blurred Shots
This article aims at exploring a case of information crisis in Italy through the lens of vaccination-related topics. Such a controversial issue, dividing public opinion and political agendas, has received diverse information coverage and public policies over time in the Italian context, whose situation appears quite unique compared with other countries because of a strong media spectacularization and politicization of the topic. In particular, ap…
(Nearly) Ten Years of Social Media and Political Elections in Italy
In this article, we reconstruct the academic discourse surrounding social media and elections in an Italian context. We follow Neumayer and Rossi's conceptualization of academic discourse concerning political protest and digital technology as constructed out of three components: (a) the social phenomena under investigation, (b) technological development, and (c) methods and techniques. In the context of social media and elections, these three com…
Right-Wing Populism and Political Instrumentalization of Religion
The study investigates the online debate sparked by the political instrumentalization of religious symbols by right-wing populist leaders, taking as a case study the campaign communication of Matteo Salvini—leader of the Italian “Lega” party—in the run-up to the 2018 and 2019 general and European elections. Against the backdrop of theories on populism, religious publicization and politicization in a social media context, the research analyzes ove…
At the onset of an infodemic
This paper analyzes the literature on problematic COVID-19 information published at the onset of the pandemic in 2020. It explores how scientific research has addressed this issue from a disciplinary, methodological and substantive perspective in different world regions. Three hundred seventy-eight articles were analyzed using content analysis and computational methods, including social network analysis and text mining. The study revealed a multi…
Pandemic Politics
One of the effects of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic has been to further accelerate the incorporation of social media activities into political and electoral campaigning. Especially as a result of lockdowns and other restrictions to offline public life, overall social media use has increased in many countries; health concerns have severely curtailed conventional in-person political campaigning activities, from doorknocking to mass rallies (even…
Revisiting Key Concepts in Digital Media Research
Recent scholarship on the intersections between digital media and political debate has taken on a decidedly pessimistic, even dystopian tone, and not without reason: from the effective use of social media platforms by populists and demagogues like Donald Trump to the expression of deepening ideological divides in online public debate, and from the emergence of partisan online communities and platforms to the intensification and exploitation of su…
Protest and repression on social media
In this study, we examine connective protest mobilization and suppression during the 2021 protests in Russia. We use time series analysis to study the dynamic interplay between the pro-Navalny movement and pro-government countermovement on Twitter, complemented by network analyses of co-retweeting networks to assess the movements’ coordination patterns. Findings show that pro-Navalny accounts were more active and coordinated within more centraliz…
Ambient Amplification
Over the last decade, the rise of memetic media in combination with multimodal platform environments have radically transformed our experience of digital culture. On TikTok, gestures and sounds go viral. Twitter (X) @tags operate as bonding tools and ignite ‘supercharged’ critical publics. Coordinated link-sharing and attention-hijacking drive cross-platform engagement. Narratives promoted by state institutions become part of the global digital c…
Transformative Tools, Emerging Challenges
Advancements in Large Language Models have been showing important research opportunities within the field of communication studies. It offers the capacity to conduct large-scale content classification and annotation with low computational expertise and reduced manual coding efforts, potentially allowing more possibilities for researchers in social sciences to explore understudied topics (Bail, 2023; Chang et al., 2024). Because of its functioning…
Mainstreaming and transnationalization of anti-gender ideas through social media
Social media platforms can be effective tools for mainstreaming and transnationalization of radical positions. Anti-gender ideas have particularly gained traction transnationally in recent years. Despite extensive research on the anti-gender movement, the specific role of social media remains underexplored. How do anti-gender organizations use social media to strategically mainstream and transnationalize their agenda? This study addresses this ov…
Waves of Attention to Racial Injustice on Social Media
The deaths of Black victims of police brutality, such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile, have become focusing events and symbols for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, catalyzing wide-spread public attention to racial injustice. While prior studies on hashtag activism predominantly focus on single and widely known cases, less is understood about why some incidents draw massive public attention while others do…
Rethinking Veganism in the Digital Age. Innovating Methodology and Typology to Explore a Decade of Facebook Discourses
In this article, we examine the expressions of veganism on Facebook, a main social media platform worldwide, through a combination of classic qualitative social science and computational methods. Building on a foundational typology proposed by Jessica Greenebaum, we adopt Weber's 'ideal types' to analyze a broad range of online vegan expressions, using Max Reinert's algorithm to identify distinct 'lexical worlds' of vegan discourses in 200,000 ve…
Multi-platform research in the light of technology affordances
This study investigates the varying structures of German far-right networks on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Telegram. Network analyses reveal platform-specific structures and dynamics. Twitter hosts the largest, rather loosely connected network, facilitating rapid content dissemination. Telegram is characterized by inward-focused communication with high clustering and overlapping communities. Facebook displays a hierarchical structu…
Political science (14 works) · Social media (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (10 works) · Social Media and Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Media studies (6 works) · Psychology (6 works)