Coordinated Behavior on Social Media in 2019 UK General Election

Authors

  • Leonardo Nizzoli University of Pisa, Dept. of Information Engineering, Pisa, Italy National Research Council of Italy Institute of Informatics and Telematics, Pisa, Italy
  • Serena Tardelli University of Pisa, Dept. of Information Engineering, Pisa, Italy National Research Council of Italy Institute of Informatics and Telematics, Pisa, Italy
  • Marco Avvenuti University of Pisa, Dept. of Information Engineering, Pisa, Italy
  • Stefano Cresci National Research Council of Italy Institute of Informatics and Telematics, Pisa, Italy
  • Maurizio Tesconi National Research Council of Italy Institute of Informatics and Telematics, Pisa, Italy

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18074

Keywords:

Social network analysis; communities identification; expertise and authority discovery, Organizational and group behavior mediated by social media; interpersonal communication mediated by social media, Qualitative and quantitative studies of social media

Abstract

Coordinated online behaviors are an essential part of information and influence operations, as they allow a more effective disinformation's spread. Most studies on coordinated behaviors involved manual investigations, and the few existing computational approaches make bold assumptions or oversimplify the problem to make it tractable. Here, we propose a new network-based framework for uncovering and studying coordinated behaviors on social media. Our research extends existing systems and goes beyond limiting binary classifications of coordinated and uncoordinated behaviors. It allows to expose different coordination patterns and to estimate the degree of coordination that characterizes diverse communities. We apply our framework to a dataset collected during the 2019 UK General Election, detecting and characterizing coordinated communities that participated in the electoral debate. Our work conveys both theoretical and practical implications and provides more nuanced and fine-grained results for studying online information manipulation.

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Published

2021-05-22

How to Cite

Nizzoli, L., Tardelli, S., Avvenuti, M., Cresci, S., & Tesconi, M. (2021). Coordinated Behavior on Social Media in 2019 UK General Election. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 15(1), 443-454. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18074