
PILATI FEDERICO
Students are invited to make contact via e-mail to schedule an appointment at office U07 - 353.
Biography
Federico Pilati is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Milano-Bicocca.
As an adjunct professor he teaches "Qualitative Methods in Digital Media Research" at the University of Bologna as well as "Machine Learning and Generative AI for Social Research" and "Video Surveillance, Datafication and New Forms of Control" at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Additionally, he contributed to the co-design of the KU Leuven MOOC on "Developing Digital Transition Strategies for Cultural Heritage Institutions", where he instructs two modules on the attention economy and on digital cultural production.
He obtained an European Doctorate from IULM University in Milan, defending a thesis titled "One Pandemic, Many Controversies. Mapping the COVID-19 'Infodemic' via Digital Methods". Throughout his doctoral studies he was affiliated with the Center for Internet and Society at CNRS in Paris and the Medialab of the University of Geneva. As an external expert he has also been involved in establishing the Infodemic Observatory, a project co-funded by the Bruno Kessler Foundation and the World Health Organization.
As a research assistant he took part in two Horizon projects, "inDICEs" and "EUMEPLAT". Furthermore, he has been a research fellow at the University of Bologna within the "Future Artificial Intelligence Research" partnership funded by NRRP. His fellowship revolved around LLMs and Generative AI, exploring the potentiality of repurposing these tools as methods to enhance and innovate social research. Finally, as a research associate at the University of Geneva, he contributed to writing the proposal and executing the "UnMiSSeD" project, which was funded through a competitive grant from the European Media and Information Fund.
Research
- Active participation in the creation of digital content, exemplified by collaborative editing on Wikipedia (OIR) and by the participation to so-called challenges in TikTok (HSSC);
- The creator economy and its associated monetization models, exemplified by live-streaming services such as Twitch (Scientific Reports) and online music distribution platforms like Bandcamp (IJCP);
- Digital subcultures, with particular reference to early Web 2.0 forums and more recent subReddits connected to the Flat Earth Society (New Media & Society), and to writing and reading communities in fanfiction forums such as the Archive of Our Own (Convergence);
- The formation of knowledge communities on Twitter during the Covid-19 (Social Science & Medicine), with particular attention both to misinformation risks and algorithmic censorship (Frontiers in Sociology);
- Mediatized controversies surrounding the Covid-19 at the nexus of rumors dissemination and the attention economy on Facebook (RIS) and Twitter (ComPol, TS, PaCo);
- Artificial Intelligence both as a tool for social research (Sociologica) and as an active agent in algorithmic public opinion (Frontiers in Political Science).
Publications
-
Pilati, F., Venturini, T. (2025). The use of artificial intelligence in counter-disinformation: a world wide (web) mapping. FRONTIERS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE, 7 [10.3389/fpos.2025.1517726]. Detail
-
Pilati, F., Sacco, P., Scianna, M., Artime, O. (2025). The broadcasting trap: TikTok and the “democratization” of digital content production. HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES COMMUNICATIONS, 12(1) [10.1057/s41599-025-04797-w]. Detail
-
Pilati, F., Houssard, A., Sacco, P. (2025). Mirroring the inequalities of mainstream music platforms: popularity, revenue, and monetization strategies on Bandcamp. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURAL POLICY, 31(3), 338-357 [10.1080/10286632.2024.2356169]. Detail
-
Pilati, F., Venturini, T., Sacco, P., Gargiulo, F. (2024). Pseudo-scientific versus anti-scientific online conspiracism: A comparison of the Flat Earth Society’s Internet forum and Reddit. NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY [10.1177/14614448241252593]. Detail
-
Pilati, F., Tartari, M., Houssard, A., Sacco, P. (2024). From fandoms to heritage. Understanding fanfiction forums as Digital Heritage Communities. CONVERGENCE [10.1177/13548565241302245]. Detail