Temporal Dynamics of Coordinated Online Behavior: Stability, Archetypes, and Influence

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Tardelli, Serena, Nizzoli, Leonardo, Tesconi, Maurizio, Conti, Mauro, Nakov, Preslav, Martino, Giovanni Da San, Cresci, Stefano
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Tardelli, Serena
Nizzoli, Leonardo
Tesconi, Maurizio
Conti, Mauro
Nakov, Preslav
Martino, Giovanni Da San
Cresci, Stefano
author_facet Tardelli, Serena
Nizzoli, Leonardo
Tesconi, Maurizio
Conti, Mauro
Nakov, Preslav
Martino, Giovanni Da San
Cresci, Stefano
contents Large-scale online campaigns, malicious or otherwise, require a significant degree of coordination among participants, which sparked interest in the study of coordinated online behavior. State-of-the-art methods for detecting coordinated behavior perform static analyses, disregarding the temporal dynamics of coordination. Here, we carry out the first dynamic analysis of coordinated behavior. To reach our goal we build a multiplex temporal network and we perform dynamic community detection to identify groups of users that exhibited coordinated behaviors in time. Thanks to our novel approach we find that: (i) coordinated communities feature variable degrees of temporal instability; (ii) dynamic analyses are needed to account for such instability, and results of static analyses can be unreliable and scarcely representative of unstable communities; (iii) some users exhibit distinct archetypal behaviors that have important practical implications; (iv) content and network characteristics contribute to explaining why users leave and join coordinated communities. Our results demonstrate the advantages of dynamic analyses and open up new directions of research on the unfolding of online debates, on the strategies of coordinated communities, and on the patterns of online influence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2301_06774
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporal Dynamics of Coordinated Online Behavior: Stability, Archetypes, and Influence
Tardelli, Serena
Nizzoli, Leonardo
Tesconi, Maurizio
Conti, Mauro
Nakov, Preslav
Martino, Giovanni Da San
Cresci, Stefano
Social and Information Networks
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Large-scale online campaigns, malicious or otherwise, require a significant degree of coordination among participants, which sparked interest in the study of coordinated online behavior. State-of-the-art methods for detecting coordinated behavior perform static analyses, disregarding the temporal dynamics of coordination. Here, we carry out the first dynamic analysis of coordinated behavior. To reach our goal we build a multiplex temporal network and we perform dynamic community detection to identify groups of users that exhibited coordinated behaviors in time. Thanks to our novel approach we find that: (i) coordinated communities feature variable degrees of temporal instability; (ii) dynamic analyses are needed to account for such instability, and results of static analyses can be unreliable and scarcely representative of unstable communities; (iii) some users exhibit distinct archetypal behaviors that have important practical implications; (iv) content and network characteristics contribute to explaining why users leave and join coordinated communities. Our results demonstrate the advantages of dynamic analyses and open up new directions of research on the unfolding of online debates, on the strategies of coordinated communities, and on the patterns of online influence.
title Temporal Dynamics of Coordinated Online Behavior: Stability, Archetypes, and Influence
topic Social and Information Networks
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06774