Sérgio Spagnuolo

How do we know who to trust? How can we filter the signal from the noise?

A leader in data journalism, Sergio Spagnuolo is building tools to answer these questions. His project as an ICFJ Innovation Fellow is Political PULSE US, a dashboard that monitors and analyzes social media posts by politicians across several platforms. Journalists can view a curated news feed, and receive an automated daily report noting which posts and topics had the most engagement and virality, and which links they shared. PPLUS will be launched this summer to help coverage of the US midterm elections.

Previously an ICFJ Knight Fellow, Spagnuolo developed Global Conflict Monitor in March 2022 to elevate reliable sources about the Russian invasion of Ukraine amidst the swirl of disinformation.

When Covid struck in 2020, he created Science Pulse to connect journalists with scientists who are active thought leaders on social media. The free digital tool tracks the commentary of more than 1,600 scientists and scientific organizations in English, Spanish and Portuguese, making it easier for journalists to follow their research and broadening the scientists’ audience. Science Pulse won several awards and CNN Brazil called it “a beneficial bubble” of reliable information.

The technology developed by Spagnuolo and his team is an open-source resource for the media and other organizations. It can be used to track social media commentary around other important issues, such as online harassment, human rights abuses, business developments and more.

As a Knight Fellow, Spagnuolo also partnered with TED, on the Healthy Internet Project, a browser extension that allows anyone to report abusive online content easily to help build a collaborative database. The project was incubated by TED with support from Jigsaw and ICFJ. Launched primarily in Brazil, it serves as an experiment for other regions.

Before becoming a Knight Fellow, Spagnuolo was an ICFJ TruthBuzz Fellow in Brazil. His project to spread verified information was conducted in partnership with Aos Fatos, a media startup formed in 2015 in response to a need for rigorously verified information, and Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest newspapers dedicated to increasing the reach of their existing fact-checking efforts.

Spagnuolo is the founder and managing-editor of the data-driven agency Volt Data Lab, founding editor of the technology website Nucleo and a former editor of Aos Fatos, the Brazilian fact-checking website. He also serves as a board member of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji).