Riccardo Gallotti

What a 400-Million-Tweet study revealed about the “War on Science” The European project “Understanding Misinformation and Science in Societal Debates” (UnMiSSeD) aims at understanding the overlap between science and misinformation with a particular focus on the COVID...

Our study of 400 million tweets shows that the “war on science” is far more complex than a simple clash between truth and falsehood.

🔍 read more in our latest article

magazine.fbk.eu/en/news/what...

@ricgallotti.bsky.social
@chub-fbk.bsky.social
@vtraag.bsky.social

Q4. If AI is the answer to online disinfo, what role is left for human judgement in deciding what counts as trustworthy information?

#AICODEPROJECT

Q5. Will AI tools empower citizens to spot disinfo themselves – or just hand more power to platforms and gatekeepers?

#AICODEPROJECT

Q3. Can AI really foster trust online, or do we first need to rebuild trust in the people/institutions deploying it?

#AICODEPROJECT

Q2. Is the biggest challenge building better AI, or convincing the public that AI-backed systems can be fair and transparent?

#AICODEPROJECT

Q1. Can any tech stay ahead of disinformation tactics that evolve just as fast?

#AICODEPROJECT

Predicting human cooperation: sensitizing drift-diffusion model to interaction and external stimuli | Journal of The Royal Society Interface Human cooperation arises naturally and is essential for the development of successful societies. This study aims to identify which aspects of the interaction influence societal cooperation and defection. Specifically, we investigate human cooperation ...

🚨 Finally our paper

"Predicting human cooperation: sensitizing drift-diffusion model to interaction and external stimuli"

is out 🤩 doi.org/10.1098/rsif...

Laura Ferrarotti, Bruno Lepri and @ricgallotti.bsky.social

@mobs-fbk.bsky.social
@chub-fbk.bsky.social

Scale-free Points-of-Interest Distribution in a City Emerging from Homogeneous Poissonian-point Processes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01699

Also seen yesterday at @css-conference.bsky.social a work on reinforcement learning applied to ants behaviour by Alessio Pitteri, our study of the historical evolution of EU projects by @verorsanigo.bsky.social and the study on Coordinated Behavior by @elisamurators.bsky.social #CCS2025

The studies presented analyse respectively:
Twitter by @annabertani.bsky.social
Telegram by @tlouf.bsky.social
Mastodon by @arregui.bsky.social
Youtube by @matteoscianna.bsky.social
#CCS2025

Wide coverage of social media and disinformation analysis yesterday from our lab at the @css-conference.bsky.social, with four talks presenting our works associate to the European projects #AI4TRUST #AICODE_EU #HATEDEMICS

New pre-print out ! Work led by @eleandre.bsky.social, in collaboration with M. Napolitano and @ricgallotti.bsky.social. Using Foursquare data from Bologna, we find that the distribution of POIs follows a clear power-law pattern at the city scale. To explain this, we introduce a framework where ...

2nd keynote Manlio De Domenico discusses approaches to figure out functionalities of complex systems
#CCS2025

Yesterday was our first day at @css-conference.bsky.social
in Siena 🇮🇹. We presented on Telegram data collection @elisamurators.bsky.social , city growth @ulyssemarquis.bsky.social and urban traffic (Alberto Amaduzzi). Excited for 5 more talks today! #CCS2025

Comparing the effectiveness of ring and block-vaccination strategies on networks Author summary Infectious diseases such as measles and Ebola have shown how quickly outbreaks can spread and how essential vaccination is to protect individuals. In our work, we investigate a spectrum...

📣🚨 New work out on @plos.org Computational Biology!

Excited and proud to have provided the world with more maps of Puglia🕷️

Thank you all @luzuzek.bsky.social Oriol Artime @ricgallotti.bsky.social @mtizzoni.bsky.social

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
💊main results below👇

Great energy at the poster session today! It was a pleasure to be part of it presenting our work "How to design a collection strategy for monitoring disinformation and hate speech in Telegram".

Excited for round two tomorrow – see you all there! ☀️

This research was done by @luzuzek.bsky.social zek.bsky.social, Juan Pablo Bascur, @annabertani.bsky.social, and @ricgallotti.bsky.social. This project is supported by European Media and Information Fund.

⤴️

So excited to see this come together! 🎉

Our latest study explores the interplay between science and misinformation in public debates during COVID-19 🔍 arxiv.org/abs/2507.01481

👇Take a look

Mapping the interaction between science and misinformation in COVID-19 tweets. Publication from @luzuzek.bsky.social, Juan Pablo Bascur, @annabertani.bsky.social, @ricgallotti.bsky.social. This project is supported by European Media and Information Fund. Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific understanding related to the topic evolved rapidly. Along with scientific information being discussed widely, a large circulation of false information, labelled an infodemic by the WHO, emerged. Here, we study the interaction between misinformation and science on Twitter (now X) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We built a comprehensive database of 407M COVID-19 related tweets and classified the reliability of URLs in the tweets based on Media Bias/Fact Check. In addition, we use Altmetric data to see whether a tweet refers to a scientific publication. We find that many users find that many users share both scientific and unreliable content; out of the 1.2M users who share science, also share unreliable content. Publications that are more frequently shared by users who also share unreliable content are more likely to be preprints, slightly more often retracted, have fewer citations, and are published in lower-impact journals on average. Our findings suggest that misinformation is not related to a ``deficit'' of science. In addition, our findings raise some critical questions about certain open science practices and their potential for misuse. Given the fundamental opposition between science and misinformation, our findings highlight the necessity for proactive scientific engagement on social media platforms to counter false narratives during global crises.

New preprint! 🚨

We study the interaction between misinformation and science on Twitter during COVID-19 based on ~407M tweets. Both science and misinformation featured prominently during the pandemic, but the interaction between the two has not been studied on this scale before.

🧵 (1/10)

The Grand Amphithéâtre of @sorbonne-universite.fr is definitively not a bad venue for a the keynote session of @sunbelt2025paris.bsky.social #Sunbelt2025

🚨 check out our latest work 👇🏼

Paris, croissants, and network science! 🌐✨
Presenting at #Sunbelt2025 on how domain-level signals help fact-checkers outsmart misinformation.

Vive la vérité!

@sunbelt2025paris.bsky.social @insna.bsky.social

🚨If you're around Paris come to see @tlouf.bsky.social talking today about the structure and dynamics of information flow on Telegram at @sunbelt2025paris.bsky.social and @css-fr.bsky.social

🎙️Busy morning today at @sunbelt2025paris.bsky.social for CHuB talking about mis/disinformation on Twitter and Mastodon

@ricgallotti.bsky.social
@kaveh-kadkhoda.bsky.social
@annabertani.bsky.social

I'm also very happy that this conference brought me back just a few hundred meters from where I used to live in the 5th arrondissement. (And no, I wasn't rich - I was sharing a triple room!)

I finally have the pleasure of attending Sunbelt in person for the first time, together with four members of my unit @chub-fbk.bsky.social
This year among the organisers we also have many familiar faces such as @camcom.bsky.social , @chavalarias.org , Floriana Gargiulo and Emmanuel Lazega.

Universal roughness and the dynamics of urban expansion We present a new approach to quantify urban sprawl using tools from surface growth physics. Analyzing built-up area expansion in 19 cities (1985-2015), we uncover anisotropic growth with branch-like e...

How do cities expand?
Using surface growth physics, we found a unique exponent governing their local geometry. Instead, their dynamics range from smooth diffusion to abrupt coalescence, with demographic pressure driving where each city lands on that spectrum.

arxiv.org/abs/2506.10656

Summer vibes in Trento ☀️

perfect for a CHuB-day at the Caldonazzo lake ⛰️🏖️

@ricgallotti.bsky.social @luzuzek.bsky.social @tlouf.bsky.social @andreaguizzo.bsky.social @ulyssemarquis.bsky.social

@css-conference.bsky.social
@ricgallotti.bsky.social
@ifisc.uib-csic.es
@elsaarcaute.bsky.social
@martikagv.bsky.social
@andreaguizzo.bsky.social
@isi.it

On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4 - Nature Human Behaviour Salvi et al. find that GPT-4 outperforms humans in debates when given basic sociodemographic data. With personalization, GPT-4 had 81.2% higher odds of post-debate agreement than humans.

This new paper finds that GPT-4 outperforms humans in debates when prompted with basic sociodemographic data.
@frasalvi.bsky.social @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social @ricgallotti.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...