Navigating Disinformation in the Age of AI
📍 Location
ONLINE & UNITRENTO
Kessler room, Department of Sociology,
Via Verdi 26, Trento, Italy
🌍 About the Event
Navigating Disinformation in the Age of AI is the final conference of the HYBRIDS project, bringing together researchers, AI experts, industry professionals, and social stakeholders to discuss the challenges posed by disinformation, online polarization, hate speech, and AI-generated content in today’s digital society.
Over three days, the conference will showcase the main scientific results of the HYBRIDS project and related research initiatives, covering topics such as misinformation detection, argument mining, fact-checking, hyperpartisan discourse, multimodal AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), and online harms.
The programme features keynote talks from internationally recognised experts, presentations from HYBRIDS doctoral candidates and partners, and discussions on the societal and democratic implications of AI technologies.
🎯 Objectives
- Showcase the main scientific results and datasets developed within the HYBRIDS project
- Foster interdisciplinary dialogue on AI, disinformation, and digital society
- Explore the societal impact of generative AI and online information disorders
- Discuss emerging challenges related to hate speech, propaganda, polarization, and fact-checking
- Strengthen collaboration between academia, industry, policy stakeholders, and civil society
👥 Who Should Attend
- Researchers and academics
- AI and NLP practitioners
- Journalists and media professionals
- Policy makers and public institutions
- Social organisations and NGOs
- Industry stakeholders and technology developers
- Students and early-career researchers
- Anyone interested in AI, misinformation, and digital communication
💡 What to Expect
- Keynote talks from leading international experts
- Research presentations on AI and disinformation
- Discussions on online harms, digital manipulation, and democratic resilience
- Insights into multilingual and multimodal misinformation detection
- Networking opportunities with researchers and stakeholders working at the intersection of AI and society
📝 Registration
👉 Registration details will be announced soon.
📣 Why Attend?
Discover how cutting-edge AI and NLP research is helping society better understand online manipulation, misinformation, hate speech, and digital polarization — and engage with experts shaping the future of trustworthy and socially responsible AI.
Hourly Schedule
Monday, 22 June 2026
- 9:00 - 9:30
- REGISTRATION
- 9:30 - 10:00
- Introduction and greetings
- 10:00 - 10:50
- Keynote 1: When do arguments become propaganda? An NLP Lens on Political discourse
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Speakers:
Serena Villata (INRIA/CNRS Sophia Antipolis)
- 10:50 - 11:30
- COFFEE BREAK
- 11:30 - 11:45
- Hybrid Methods for Detecting Extremist Narratives in Migration Discourse
-
Speakers:
Erik BRAN MARINO (University of Evora, Portugal)
- 11:45 - 12:00
- Assisted Counterspeech Writing at the Crossroads of Hate Speech and Misinformation
-
Speakers:
Helena Bonaldi (FBK)
- 12:00 - 12:15
- EuroVerdict: A Multilingual Dataset for Verdict Generation Against Misinformation.
-
Speakers:
Stefano Menini (FBK)
- 12:15 - 12:30
- Analyzing Dataset Quality through the Lens of Language Model interpretability
-
Speakers:
Rabiraj BANDYOPADHYAY (Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany)
- 12:30 - 12:45
- How Language Models Conflate Logical Validity with Plausibility: A Representational Analysis of Content Effects
-
Speakers:
Leonardo Bertolazzi (University of Trento)
- 12:45 - 13:00
- Text-level genericity in machine and human text
-
Speakers:
Søren FOMSGAARD (University of Caen Normandy)
- 13:00 - 14:30
- LUNCH
- 14:30 - 15:20
- Keynote 2: The Big V. Online gender-based violence in a changing technospace
-
Speakers:
Elena Pavan (University of Trento)
- 15:20 - 15:35
- Challenges in Synthetic Data to Detect Hate Speech
-
Speakers:
Camilla Casula (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)
- 15:35 - 15:50
- Addressing Geographic Bias in Hate Speech Detection using Debias Tuning in Large Language Models
-
Speakers:
Paloma PIOT PEREZ ABADIN (University of La Coruña, Spain)
- 15:50 - 16:00
- Closing day 1
Tuesday, 23 June 2026
- 9:15 - 9:30
- Opening Day 2
- 9:30 - 10:20
- Keynote Day 2: Social influence and misinformation online
-
Speakers:
Alberto Acerbi (University of Trento)
- 10:20 - 11:00
- COFFEE BREAK
- 11:00 - 11:15
- Drawing digital lines: pattern analysis of divisive rhetoric in social network discussions
-
Speakers:
Davide BASSI (CiTIUS- University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
- 11:15 - 11:30
- To Click it or not to Click it: An Italian Dataset for Neutralising Clickbait Headlines.
-
Speakers:
Daniel Russo (FBK)
- 11:30 - 11:45
- Hyperpartisan news detection
-
Speakers:
Michele Joshua MAGGINI (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
- 11:45 - 12:00
- Mapping the interaction between science and misinformation in COVID-19 tweets
-
Speakers:
Lucila G Alvarez-Zuzek (FBK)
- 12:00 - 12:15
- Multimodal fact-checking
-
Speakers:
Rafael FRADE (Newtral, Spain)
- 12:15 - 12:30
- Multilingual vs Crosslingual Retrieval of Fact-checked Claims.
-
Speakers:
Marco Rovera (FBK)
- 12:30 - 14:00
- LUNCH
- 14:00 - 14:50
- Keynote Day 2: On disinformation and the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4
-
Speakers:
Riccardo Gallotti (FBK)
- 14:50 - 15:05
- The Dangerous Effects of a Frustratingly Easy LLMs Jailbreak Attack
-
Speakers:
Marco Bombieri (University of Trento)
- 15:05 - 15:20
- You Don't Bring Me Flowers: Mitigating Unwanted Recommendations Through Conformal Risk Control
-
Speakers:
Giovanni De Toni (FBK)
- 15:20 - 16:00
- COFFEE BREAK
- 16:00 - 16:15
- From Argument Mining to Reasoning: Structural Dynamics of Political Conversations
-
Speakers:
Siddharth BHARGAVA (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
- 16:15 - 16:30
- A Resource for Implicit Argumentation Detection: Dataset and Findings
-
Speakers:
Martial PASTOR (Radboud University, The Netherlands)
- 16:30 - 16:45
- Detecting Winning Arguments with Large Language Models and Persuasion Strategies
-
Speakers:
Tiziano Labruna (FBK)
- 16:45 - 17:00
- Fine-grained Fallacy Detection with Human Label Variation.
-
Speakers:
Alan Ramponi (FBK)
- 17:00 - 17:10
- Closing day 2
Wednesday 24 June 2026
- 9:15 - 9:30
- Opening Day 3
-
Speakers:
Michela Milano (FBK DIGIS center)
- 9:30 - 10:00
- TBD
-
Speakers:
Giovanni Da San Martino (University of Padova)
- 10:00 - 10:30
- Claim matching for automated fact-checking
-
Speakers:
Arkaitz Zubiaga (Queen Mary University of London)
- 10:30 - 11:00
- Beyond Benchmarks: What Emotion Mining in Historical Texts Reveals About LLMs
-
Speakers:
Patricia Martín (University of A Coruña)
- 11:00 - 11:30
- COFFEE BREAK
- 11:30 - 11:45
- Multilingual Assessment of Stereotypes in Large Language Models
-
Speakers:
Beatrice Savoldi (FBK)
- 11:45 - 12:00
- Representations and instantiations of conspiracy theories
-
Speakers:
Katarina LAKEN (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
- 12:00 - 12:15
- When Is It Hate? Rethinking Disagreement in Subjective NLP Tasks
-
Speakers:
Elisa Leonardelli (FBK)
- 12:15 - 12:30
- Closing
Serena Villata (INRIA/CNRS Sophia Antipolis)
Erik BRAN MARINO (University of Evora, Portugal)
Erik Bran Marino is an Italian PhD researcher and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Universidade de Évora in Portugal, contributing to the HYBRIDS project. His work bridges natural language processing (NLP) and social sciences to detect political disinformation in online media. Erik earned his Master's degree in Sociology and Social Research from the Università degli Studi di Torino, graduating with honors. His thesis investigated Russian manipulation of Western public opinion through conspiracy networks on Telegram. He has presented his research progress at international conferences such as APSA in Philadelphia and AECPA in Burgos. His publications cover topics like sentiment analysis in Portuguese political manifestos and the polarization loop on social media. Proficient in English, Italian, Spanish, French, and intermediate in Portuguese, Erik combines his passion for NLP and AI technologies with his social science background to advance interdisciplinary research.
Helena Bonaldi (FBK)
Stefano Menini (FBK)
Rabiraj BANDYOPADHYAY (Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany)
I want to use NLP to mitigate harmful content and make social media safe and inclusive for everyone.
I am passionate about leveraging NLP to help people and my PhD topic will deal with developing socially aware NLP systems that can help in mitigating harmful online content. I have experience in building NLP systems to solve various business problems, and using NLP and Deep Learning to model online user behavior in social networks (Twitter) and text repositories (Wikipedia) while pursuing my Masters from University at Buffalo (State University of New York)
Leonardo Bertolazzi (University of Trento)
Søren FOMSGAARD (University of Caen Normandy)
Coming from computational linguistics and philosophy technology, I am interested in how linguistic patterns or styles differ between humans and machines.
Textual online content generated and/or propagated by non-human agents has become an increasingly present phenomenon on social media platforms. When deployed with malicious intent, the behavior of this kind of agent can have impacts that are either directly harmful to people that are targeted by this behavior, for example, through toxic language use, or impacts that are more indirectly harmful, for example, by intervening in political discourse.
With the advent of contemporary large language models, the near future may feature more bots that employ increasingly sophisticated human-like harmful language online. Therefore, being able to detect linguistic patterns and idiosyncrasies will play a role in identifying harmful textual content that is not only spread but also generated by machines.
My research interests include authorship analysis, computational sociolinguistics, and the philosophical issue of what defines and differentiates human, non-human, and hybrid forms of agency. I joined the HYBRIDS project because of its focus on interdisciplinary research, interaction, and collaboration, both in its individual research tracks and at the network level.
Elena Pavan (University of Trento)
Paloma PIOT PEREZ ABADIN (University of La Coruña, Spain)
Paloma’s code breaks the chains of online hate, setting a new standard for digital discourse.
Paloma has a computer science background with experience in natural language processing models applied in social media addressing sensitive topics like detecting depression symptoms. She has industry experience working in different companies from different countries, advocates for women’s visibility in STEM, and likes participating in conferences and tech activities. She also enjoys listening to music and concert photography.
Alberto Acerbi (University of Trento)
Davide BASSI (CiTIUS- University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
Davide has a background in discursive psychology and mediation. He is now working to assess the impact of political discourses on community interactions.
Davide studied Anthropology and Psychology at the University of Bologna. Then he moved to the University of Padova, where he obtained his master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and, after, a II level master’s degree in Mediation.
He worked as research fellow at the University of Padova, using computational social sciences to tackle community issues such as stigmatization, social cohesion and misinformation.
His research aims at using argumentation and rhetorical theories to assess and observe how political discourses impact on users’ interactions in social networks. Using these theoretical-methodological references, he will focus his analysis on the topics of “Euroscepticism” and “Immigration”.
Daniel Russo (FBK)
Michele Joshua MAGGINI (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
Michele has a hybrid background in Humanities and Big Data. He has been working as a teacher and is now focusing on partisanship detection with DL.
Michele has been teaching Humanities for several years, cultivating an interest in the Philosophy of Science. Then, he graduated with an MSc in Big Data & Social Mining. He has increased his awareness of NLP, specifically in Social Network Analysis and LLM. His research is focused on developing systems for the automated detection of hyperpartisan news.
Lucila G Alvarez-Zuzek (FBK)
Rafael FRADE (Newtral, Spain)
Phd candidate at Newtral researching automated fact-checking and multi-modal machine learning.
I am currently researching automated fact-checking, namely multi-modal claim matching. The objective is to develop models and mechanisms to help fight the spread of fake news. Some of the applications we’re planning to work on are euroscepticism, climate emergency and health.
I have a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences and a master’s in Economics. Before joining Newtral, I have worked as a software developer and as research assistant in projects of applied econometrics and economic growth. I am open to collaborations in projects involving automated fact-checking, semantic similarity, machine reasoning, information retrieval, multi-modal ML, applications of LLMs and machine learning applied to social sciences in general.
Marco Rovera (FBK)
Riccardo Gallotti (FBK)
Marco Bombieri (University of Trento)
Giovanni De Toni (FBK)
Siddharth BHARGAVA (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
With a demonstrated history of working in Data Science and AI, Siddharth is currently involved in discourse analysis and argumentation studies.
Having received his B.Tech in Computer Science at VIT Vellore India and M.Sc. in Data Science at LMU Munich Germany, Siddharth has worked as a research student during his Master’s program wherein he developed a deep passion for the fields of discourse analysis and argumentation. He actively participates in various tech and Artificial Intelligence events, looking for opportunities to connect and exchange ideas with people from around the world. If not caught solving data challenges, you can find him in the kitchen, fitness training, or travelling. Siddharth, as a MSCA fellow, hopes to become a strong voice for advocating open and fair data science practices, particularly in social sciences. His living philosophy is, “If you have the will, you will find the way.”
Martial PASTOR (Radboud University, The Netherlands)
Investigating rhetoric in new forms of textual mediums’.
Martial Pastor has background in Computer Science, Linguistics and Film Studies. He demonstrates a keen interest in using computational approaches to modelling various linguistic and cultural phenomena. He is particularly focused on the confrontation of NLP models with language diversity. Some of his previous projections include Corpus Linguistics investigations into speech dysfluencies, collaborations with psychiatrists to gain insights into the linguistic manifestations of pain, and database-driven research on language change, utilizing etymons sourced from over 50 different language families.
Tiziano Labruna (FBK)
Alan Ramponi (FBK)
Michela Milano (FBK DIGIS center)
Giovanni Da San Martino (University of Padova)
Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics.
Arkaitz Zubiaga (Queen Mary University of London)
My research revolves around Social Data Science, interdisciplinary research bridging Computational Social Science and Natural Language Processing.
I am a senior lecturer (associate professor) at Queen Mary University of London, where I co-lead the Social Data Science lab, I’m a member of the Computational Linguistics Lab and a DERI Fellow. My research revolves around Social Data Science, interdisciplinary research bridging Computational Social Science and Natural Language Processing. I’m particularly interested in linking online data with events in the real world, among others for tackling problematic issues on the Web and social media that can have a damaging effect on individuals or society at large, such as hate speech, misinformation, inequality, biases and other forms of online harm. I have published 140+ papers (including 50+ journal articles). I serve in the editorial boards of 7 journals and I’m a regular SPC member for top conferences in computational social science, natural language processing and artificial intelligence.
Patricia Martín (University of A Coruña)
Assistent Professor, University of A Coruña (UDC)
My research focuses on the language, software and humanities intersection, and how technology and linguistic information help us solve humanistic and social problems.
I am assistant professor at the information retrieval lab (University of A Coruña). With background in software engineering, a PhD. in cultural heritage domain, a postdoc specialization in linguistics and computing and several stays abroad (Chile, Portugal, France), I focus on the study of the interconnection between humanities, software engineering and language. I have been involved in several european (i.e. FP7 ARIADNE, COST Action SEADDA) and national projects in Digital Humanities, Computational Linguistics, Software Engineering and Information Retrieval. How can we use technology to treat the information contained in our language, so that it helps us solve humanistic and social problems? Is my main research questions, with different directions in computational linguistics, social networks, corpus and heritage studies, etc. I am also especially involved in the training of hybrid profiles at all education levels (undergraduate, master's, postgraduate, Ph.D.) in Digital Humanities.
Beatrice Savoldi (FBK)
Katarina LAKEN (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
I’m a passionate linguist who loves finding patterns in apparent chaos.
The thing I love most about language is the way it combines apparent chaos with a logical system of rules. During my bachelor’s and master’s in linguistics I specialized in language technology and NLP. This PhD position allows me to put these skills to good use combating hate speech and misinformation. In my free time I enjoy studying languages and hiking.
Elisa Leonardelli (FBK)
Speakers
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Serena Villata (INRIA/CNRS Sophia Antipolis)
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Elena Pavan (University of Trento)
-
Alberto Acerbi (University of Trento)
-
Riccardo Gallotti (FBK)