Amplifying influence through coordinated behaviour in social networks

Political misinformation, astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects that rely on making the voices of the few sounds like the roar of the many. These are especially dangerous when they influence democratic systems and government policy. Many previous approaches examining these phenomena have focused on identifying campaigns rather than the small groups responsible for instigating or sustaining them. To reveal latent (i.e. hidden) networks of cooperating accounts, we propose a novel temporal window approach that can rely on account interactions and metadata alone. It detects groups of accounts engaging in various behaviours that, in concert, come to execute different goal-based amplification strategies, a number of which we describe, alongside other inauthentic strategies from the literature. The approach relies upon a pipeline that extracts relevant elements from social media posts common to the major platforms, infers connections between accounts based on criteria matching the coordination strategies to build an undirected weighted network of accounts, which is then mined for communities exhibiting high levels of evidence of coordination using a novel community extraction method. We address the temporal aspect of the data by using a windowing mechanism, which may be suitable for near real-time application. We further highlight consistent coordination with a sliding frame across multiple windows and application of a decay factor. Our approach is compared with other recent similar processing approaches and community detection methods and is validated against two politically relevant Twitter datasets with ground truth data, using content, temporal, and network analyses, as well as with the design, training and application of three one-class classifiers built using the ground truth; its utility is furthermore demonstrated in two case studies of contentious online discussions.

Automated summary

Political misinformation, astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviors with significant real-world effects that can influence democratic systems and government policy. Studying these behaviors requires focusing on the small groups behind campaigns and utilizing novel temporal window approaches to detect latent networks of cooperating accounts.