Research Colloquium: Prof. Dr. Nicola Righetti (University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy): "Coordinated Behavior on Social Media: Concepts and Tools"

On 15/05/2024, the research colloquium by Prof. Dr Nicola Righetti on ‘Coordinated Behaviour on Social Media: Concepts and Tools’ will take place at the ZeMKI.

• Date: 15. May 2024
• Time: 16:15
• Street: Linzer Str 4
• Location: ZeMKI
• Room: 60.070

Coordination is central to social and communicative behaviors online and offline. Recently, this concept has been incorporated into disinformation studies, focusing on inauthenticity and social media manipulation, thereby generating considerable attention. In this talk, I explore various coordinated behaviors on social media and discuss related detection and analysis methodologies. Investigating coordinated behavior on social media typically uses observational designs and digital traces, though similar observed patterns of coordination can emerge from diverse underlying processes and motives. Examples include editorial networks broadcasting news items across Facebook pages, hyperactive users sharing content across groups, and botnets spamming misleading advertisements. Software tools have been developed to identify and analyze coordination on social media. I will demonstrate the methodology for detecting such coordination using the R package CooRTweet (Righetti & Balluff, 2024). I will highlight the tool’s versatility in uncovering coordination dynamics by using examples such as cross-platform and visual content sharing from a dataset on the 2021 German elections and climate-related topics. Additionally, I will discuss the limitations, challenges, and potential developments of these methodologies.

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Bio:
Nicola Righetti is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences, Humanities, and International Studies at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, where he teaches Digital Methods. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna and an associate researcher at the Computational Communication Science Lab at the same university. He obtained his PhD in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Verona, Italy.