Digital journalism and disinformation in the age of platformization

On January 16 , 2026, the course Digital Journalism and Disinformation in the Age of Platformization, taught by Prof. Oscar Westlund from Oslo Metropolitan University, will begin. The second part of the course will take place in the spring of 2026.

Faced with unprecedented criticism and attacks on traditional authorities of knowledge—from journalism to academia—the rise of fake news and disinformation has fundamentally changed the way we perceive truth. This course analyzes the contemporary and rapidly changing media landscape, asking questions about how different social actors respond to these challenges. The growing importance of authoritarianism has led to attacks on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and academic freedom.

The course introduces students to key research in the field of digital journalism studies, focusing on journalism and fact-checking in the context of disinformation in platformized environments. Both proactive and reactive paradigms for combating disinformation will be discussed, including preliminary verification of journalistic claims and prebunking strategies used by fact-checkers, as well as post-publication fact-checking and debunking. In addition, the course addresses the increasingly important role of media and information literacy, capable of responding to constant social and media changes.

The course is organized in the form of two teaching sessions, including lectures, workshops, and group presentations. During the first session, Prof. Westlund will present key research related to the course topic and introduce team tasks to be completed for the second session. These tasks will involve analyzing platform management in relation to key concepts. In addition, Prof. Westlund will provide an intensive introduction to academic writing, drawing on his extensive experience as editor-in-chief of one of the world's leading scientific journals.

Upon successful completion of the course, participants will be able to:
● Critically evaluate fundamental and recent research on digital journalism and fact-checking in the context of platformization.
● Distinguish and analyze the ways in which researchers conceptualize and differentiate between disinformation, misinformation, and "fake news."
● Assess the complexity of platform management in the context of spreading and limiting false information.
● Apply the principles of academic writing and sound research design in your own academic work.

Oscar Westlund (PhD) has been a professor at Oslo Metropolitan University since 2018, where he co-leads the OsloMet Digital Journalism Research Group and institutionalized the OsloMet DJRG scholarship program, which has attracted more than 30 scholarship recipients from around the world. Since 2018, he has served as editor-in-chief of Digital Journalism, one of the leading international journals in the field of communication, where he has introduced several new article formats. He is the author and editor of numerous books and over 100 articles, chapters, and reports. His award-winning research focuses on journalism, social media, mobile media, disinformation, fact-checking, and media and information literacy. Westlund has worked at several renowned universities in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. In 2011, he was a visiting scholar at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford and serves as Sweden's representative in the annual RISJ Digital News Report project. Together with his colleagues, he has carried out and received award-winning research projects funded by national research councils in Norway, Sweden, Spain, and Singapore. He has also worked as a research leader at the Swedish Government Offices and participated in several European Union committees. In 2026, he is a visiting professor at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology (PJAIT) and a research associate at the Public Tech Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin. Since 2021, he has continuously served as chairman of the advisory board of the Nordic Observatory for Digital Media and Information Disorder (NORDIS), an independent, apolitical, and interdisciplinary center operating within the EU Digital Media Observatory.

Social media analysis and persuasion detection

On December 4 and 5 , 2025, guest lectures on social media analysis and persuasion detection will be held by Prof. Giovanni Da San Martino and Alessandro Galeazzi from the University of Padua.

The course will introduce students to the theoretical foundations and computational methods for detecting debate structures and persuasive techniques in social media environments. Drawing on advances in social computing, network analysis and natural language processing (NLP), the course analyzes the dynamics of online discussions and how digital communication shapes public opinion and user behavior. Participants will learn to detect online communities, measure polarization on social media platforms, and identify a variety of persuasive strategies in online content.

The course will begin with lectures on NLP and web analytics, covering linguistic and psychological aspects of persuasion, user and content characterization, community detection and polarization measurement. These topics will be discussed from both theoretical and practical perspectives, with an overview of relevant algorithms and tools.

Participants will then apply these methods to an actual social media dataset. Using open-source tools and R/Python libraries, they will identify online communities, characterize their behavior, map interactions, and compare the use of persuasive techniques across groups.

Upon completion of the course, participants will be able to:

• integrate network and textual analysis to interpret the dynamics of online discourse,

• Collect and process social media data for large-scale analysis,

• Use community detection and polarization measurement methods to identify structural divisions,

• Use NLP methods to detect linguistic markers of persuasion and influence.

Giovanni Da San Martino is an assistant professor (Associate Professor) at the University of Padua. He received his PhD degree in computer science from the University of Bologna in 2009. Before joining the University of Padova, he worked as a researcher at Qatar Computing Research Institute. His research interests are at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing. He received the Best Paper award at the WebSCI'22 conference and two honorable mentions at ACL'20 and SemEval'21. He served as general chair at the CLEF 2022 conference, and was chair of the SemEval organization from 2023 to 2024. He was also a Principal Investigator (PI) in several projects on disinformation, including analyses of persuasion techniques (logical fallacies and emotion-based techniques) and their co-occurrence with narratives in disinformation campaigns.

Alessandro Galeazzi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Padova, where he works in the SPRITZ research group. Prior to joining the University of Padova, he received his Ph.D. in Information Engineering from the University of Brescia, and then worked as a postdoc at Ca' Foscari University in Venice and as a visiting researcher at Central European University. His research is at the intersection of computational social science, data science and network science, with a particular focus on information dynamics, polarization and algorithmic bias in online platforms. His work has been published in leading international journals such as PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Climate Change, PNAS Nexus and Scientific Reports, and has contributed to EU and national projects on media, cyber security and information ecosystems.