62 citations · 398 across the 40 of their papers we have counts for
47 papers
Watching What We Eat: Information Quality and Body Image in Diet-Related YouTube Videos
Maddalena Ghiotti, Daniela Paolotti, Yelena Mejova
The widespread use of social media, particularly image- and video-based platforms, has turned them into key sources of both normative and informational content related to health an…
Verifiable Disaster Storylines and Causal Knowledge Graphs: A Citation-Grounded Pipeline from Heterogeneous Humanitarian Sources
Ivan Decostanzi, Michele Ronco, Sergio Consoli +8
Effective humanitarian response depends on the rapid synthesis of heterogeneous, high-volume information sources - a task that routinely exceeds human analytical capacity in the cr…
Conditional Publics: Shared Events and Divergent Meanings in the European Twitter Debate on the Ukraine War
Corrado Monti, Arthur Capozzi, Yelena Mejova +1
How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 Europ…
A Large-Language-Model Framework for Automated Humanitarian Situation Reporting
Ivan Decostanzi, Yelena Mejova, Kyriaki Kalimeri
Timely and accurate situational reports are essential for humanitarian decision-making, yet current workflows remain largely manual, resource intensive, and inconsistent. We presen…
Vaccine Hesitancy on YouTube: a Competition between Health and Politics
Yelena Mejova, Michele Tizzani
YouTube has rapidly emerged as a predominant platform for content consumption, effectively displacing conventional media such as television and news outlets. A part of the enormous…
Google Search Advertising after Dobbs v. Jackson
Yelena Mejova, Ronald E. Robertson, Catherine A. Gimbrone +1
Search engines have become the gateway to information, products, and services, including those concerning healthcare. Access to reproductive health has been especially complicated…
Too Little, Too Late: Moderation of Misinformation around the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict
Gautam Kishore Shahi, Yelena Mejova
In this study, we examine the role of Twitter as a first line of defense against misinformation by tracking the public engagement with, and the platforms response to, 500 tweets co…
The Role of Science in the Climate Change Discussions on Reddit
Paolo Cornale, Michele Tizzani, Fabio Ciulla +4
Collective and individual action necessary to address climate change hinges on the public's understanding of the relevant scientific findings. In this study, we examine the use of…
Language-Agnostic Modeling of Source Reliability on Wikipedia
Jacopo D'Ignazi, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, Yelena Mejova +4
Over the last few years, verifying the credibility of information sources has become a fundamental need to combat disinformation. Here, we present a language-agnostic model designe…
Quantitative Information Extraction from Humanitarian Documents
Daniele Liberatore, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Derya Sever +1
Humanitarian action is accompanied by a mass of reports, summaries, news, and other documents. To guide its activities, important information must be quickly extracted from such fr…
Leave no Place Behind: Improved Geolocation in Humanitarian Documents
Enrico M. Belliardo, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Yelena Mejova
Geographical location is a crucial element of humanitarian response, outlining vulnerable populations, ongoing events, and available resources. Latest developments in Natural Langu…
Narratives of War: Ukrainian Memetic Warfare on Twitter
Yelena Mejova, Arthur Capozzi, Corrado Monti +1
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen an intensification in the use of social media by governmental actors in cyber warfare. Wartime communication via memes has been a succ…
Political Context of the European Vaccine Debate on Twitter
Giordano Paoletti, Lorenzo Dall'Amico, Kyriaki Kalimeri +5
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears grew that making vaccination a political (instead of public health) issue may impact the efficacy of this life-saving intervention,…
Comfort Foods and Community Connectedness: Investigating Diet Change during COVID-19 Using YouTube Videos on Twitter
Yelena Mejova, Lydia Manikonda
Unprecedented lockdowns at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic have drastically changed the routines of millions of people, potentially impacting important health-related behaviors.…
Authority without Care: Moral Values behind the Mask Mandate Response
Yelena Mejova, Kyrieki Kalimeri, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales
Face masks are one of the cheapest and most effective non-pharmaceutical interventions available against airborne diseases such as COVID-19. Unfortunately, they have been met with…
The Thin Ideology of Populist Advertising on Facebook during the 2019 EU Elections
Arthur Capozzi, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Yelena Mejova +2
Social media has been an important tool in the expansion of the populist message, and it is thought to have contributed to the electoral success of populist parties in the past dec…
Global misinformation spillovers in the online vaccination debate before and during COVID-19
Jacopo Lenti, Kyriaki Kalimeri, André Panisson +4
Anti-vaccination views pervade online social media, fueling distrust in scientific expertise and increasing vaccine-hesitant individuals. While previous studies focused on specific…
Modeling Political Activism around Gun Debate via Social Media
Yelena Mejova, Jisun An, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales +1
The United States have some of the highest rates of gun violence among developed countries. Yet, there is a disagreement about the extent to which firearms should be regulated. In…
Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Debate
Giuseppe Crupi, Yelena Mejova, Michele Tizzani +2
Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the country, but pre-pandemic vaccination debate has been shown to be polarized and siloed into echo chambers. It is th…
Googling for Abortion: Search Engine Mediation of Abortion Accessibility in the United States
Yelena Mejova, Tatiana Gracyk, Ronald E. Robertson
Among the myriad barriers to abortion access, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) pose an additional difficulty by targeting women with unexpected or "crisis" pregnancies in order to d…
Mapping urban socioeconomic inequalities in developing countries through Facebook advertising data
Serena Giurgola, Simone Piaggesi, Márton Karsai +3
Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere is the number one Sustainable Development Goal of the UN 2030 Agenda. To monitor the progress towards such an ambitious target, reliable,…
Developing Annotated Resources for Internal Displacement Monitoring
Fabio Poletto, Yunbai Zhang, Andre Panisson +3
This paper describes in details the design and development of a novel annotation framework and of annotated resources for Internal Displacement, as the outcome of a collaboration w…
YouTubing at Home: Media Sharing Behavior Change as Proxy for MobilityAround COVID-19 Lockdowns
Yelena Mejova, Nicolas Kourtellis
Compliance with public health measures, such as restrictions on movement and socialization, is paramount in limiting the spread of diseases such as the severe acute respiratory syn…
Clandestino or Rifugiato? Anti-immigration Facebook Ad Targeting in Italy
Arthur Capozzi, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Yelena Mejova +3
Monitoring advertising around controversial issues is an important step in ensuring accountability and transparency of political processes. To that end, we use the Facebook Ads Lib…