This morning, PIANO had its kick-off meeting in the premises of the project coordinator, the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the National Research Council, in Pisa, Italy. The project’s multidisciplinary consortium is also composed by the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa, and the Department of Humanities of the University of Foggia.
PIANO is part of the Italian program PRIN 2022 (Research Projects of National Interest) and is funded by Next Generation EU. The project will advance our current understanding and countermeasures regarding online toxicity on social media, a harmful behavior that hinders civil discourse online and might even have serious consequences offline. The main goal of the project is to develop a set of theorical and practical tools for personalized moderation interventions against online toxicity, based on user characterization and analysis of past behavior.
During the kick-off meeting, representatives of the consortium gathered —physically and virtually— to discuss the project’s two-year work plan and make the necessary adjustments, in view of significant changes in the social media landscape since the original proposal. For instance, during the previous year we saw the transformation of Twitter into X, which has a more lax moderation policy, touted as respectful of freedom of speech but critized as too permissive. Another example was the disruptive arrival of ChatGPT, by OpenAI, which raised the stakes regarding the challenges of moderating human-like articially generated text content.
Such events signal that online content moderation is ever more relevant, and confirm the need of better and more sophisticated knowledge and tools to contrast online misbehavior, such as those proposed by PIANO.