DEcision supporT systEm foR cybeR intelligENCE" bando a cascata “SERICS - SEcurity and RIghts in the CyberSpace” cod progetto PE00000014
Type
Bandi a cascata PNRR - Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza
CUP
D43C22003050001
Principal Investigator
Giovanni Da San Martino (Università degli Studi di Padova - Dipartimento di Matematica "Tullio Levi Civita")
Duration
20/02/2024 - 21/11/2025
Description
Social media play a crucial role in information disorder. In this context, colluding users
carry out coordinated activities (also using automation) to spread malicious content for
manipulating others. The consequences of such manipulations are polarization, radicalization and misinformation, which contribute to a climate of distrust and negatively affect public opinions, other than undermining online participation.
The main objective of the DETERRENCE project is to study the Information Disorder
phenomenon on social media with the aim of designing a proof of concept of decision support tools (DSS) to monitor and mitigate its impact, both for individuals and for society in general. Principal project activities are devoted to: (i) detect and investigate, through network science methods, coordinated online behaviors especially on large-scale campaigns also identifying automated behavior; (ii) develop techniques for detecting the next generation of fake accounts and content, including malicious accounts, as well as deepfake texts and multimedia content; (iii) investigate the dynamics of communities and social networks that can be potentially exposed to cognitive bias which in turn could cause or amplify noxious phenomena such as gender discrimination, racism, cyber bullying and so on.
Activities
Nel progetto è stato assunto un postdoc per un anno, Tiziano LaBruna, il cui contratto terminerà 1/11/2025.
Scuole estive organizzate all'interno del progetto:
- Artificial Intelligence for a Secure Society, in Capo Vaticano, Ricaldi (VV) - Calabria, Italy, from September 5 to 10, 2024. Sito: https://ai4securesociety.sobigdata.it/
- Artificial Intelligence for a Secure Society, in Otranto (LE) - Puglia, Italy, from July 6 to 12, 2025. Sito: https://serics.eu/serics-academy/artificial-intelligence-for-a-secure-society-2nd-edition-of-the-summer-school/
Related publications
Elisa Sartori, Serena Tardelli, Maurizio Tesconi, Mauro Conti, Alessandro Galeazzi, Stefano Cresci, Giovanni Da San Martino, Insights into using temporal coordinated behaviour to explore connections between social media posts and influence, to Appear in EMNLP 2025 Findings
Edoardo Di Martino, Alessandro Galeazzi, Michele Starnini, Walter Quattrociocchi, Matteo Cinelli, Ideological fragmentation of the social media ecosystem: From echo chambers to echo platforms, PNAS Nexus, 2025
Tarek Mahmoud, Zhuohan Xie, Dimitar Dimitrov, Nikolaos Nikolaidis, Purificação Silvano, Roman Yangarber, Shivam Sharma, Elisa Sartori, Nicolas Stefanovitch, Giovanni Da San Martino, Jakub Piskorski, Preslav Nakov, "Entity Framing and Role Portrayal in the News", to appear in ACL 2025, Wien.
Nikolaos Nikolaidis, Nicolas Stefanovitch, Purificação Silvano, Dimitar Dimitrov, Roman Yangarber, Nuno Guimarães, Elisa Sartori, Ion Androutsopoulos, Preslav Nakov, Giovanni Da San Martino, Jakub Piskorski, "PolyNarrative: A Multilingual, Multilabel, Multi-domain Dataset for Narrative Extraction from News Articles", to appear in ACL 2025, Wien.
Tardelli, S., Nizzoli, L., Tesconi, M., Conti, M., Nakov, P., Da San Martino, G., & Cresci, S. (2024). Temporal dynamics of coordinated online behavior: Stability, archetypes, and influence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 121(20), e2307038121.
Arkadiusz Modzelewski, Giovanni Da San Martino, Pavel Savov, Magdalena Anna Wilczyńska, and Adam Wierzbicki. 2024. MIPD: Exploring Manipulation and Intention In a Novel Corpus of Polish Disinformation. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 19769–19785, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Arkadiusz Modzelewski, Witold Sosnowski, Tiziano Labruna, Adam Wierzbicki, and Giovanni Da San Martino. 2025. PCoT: Persuasion-Augmented Chain of Thought for Detecting Fake News and Social Media Disinformation. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 24959–24983, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Jakub Piskorski, Tarek Mahmoud, Nikolaos Nikolaidis, Ricardo Campos, Alipio Mario Jorge, Dimitar Dimitrov, Purificação Silvano, Roman Yangarber, Shivam Sharma, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Nuno Guimaraes, Elisa Sartori, Nicolas Stefanovitch, Zhuohan Xie, Preslav Nakov, and Giovanni Da San Martino. 2025. SemEval 2025 Task 10: Multilingual Characterization and Extraction of Narratives from Online News. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), pages 2610–2643, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
