Coordinated Behavior

Coordinated behavior (or coordinated inauthentic behavior, CIB) refers to organized groups of accounts acting in concert to manipulate discourse, amplify messages, or manipulate public perception on social media. Unlike spam or bot activity focused narrowly on a single platform or modality, coordination typically involves multiple accounts, multiple action types (posts, comments, shares, hashtags), and sustained temporal patterns.

Key papers

• Statistical Detectability of Coordination — statistical framework for detecting coordination via hypothesis testing on account pairs

Related topics

• Bot detection (related but distinct: a bot is a single account; coordination involves multiple accounts)
• Information operations (broader context; coordination is often a tactic used in information operations)
• Computational Propaganda (adjacent subfield)