Detecting Coordination in Disinformation Campaigns
A technical how-to for open source investigators
Coordination is one of the central features of information operations and disinformation campaigns, which can be defined as concerted efforts to target people with false or misleading information, often with some strategic objective (political, social, financial), while using the affordances provided by social media platforms.
Since 2017, platforms like Facebook have developed new framings, policies, and entire teams to counter bad actors using its platform to interfere in elections, drive political polarization, or manipulate public opinion. After several iterations, the platform has settled on describing malicious activity like this as “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” referring to a group of actors “working in concert to engage in inauthentic behavior…where the use of fake accounts is central to the operation.”
More broadly, Twitter uses the phrase “platform manipulation,” which includes a range of actions, but also focuses on “coordinated activity…that attempts to artificially influence conversations through the use of multiple accounts, fake accounts, automation and/or scripting.”
Unfortunately, open source researchers have limited data at their disposal to assess some of the characteristics of…
