Who's in the Gang? Revealing Coordinating Communities in Social Media

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel temporal window method to identify coordinated groups of social media accounts involved in malicious behaviors like astroturfing and trolling, using only interaction data and metadata.

Contribution

It presents a new approach for detecting latent coordinating communities in social media, focusing on small groups rather than broad campaigns, validated with real datasets.

Findings

Effective detection of coordinated groups in social media

Validated approach with ground truth datasets

Revealed strategies of malicious account cooperation

Abstract

Political astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects. Common approaches examining these phenomena focus on broad campaigns rather than the small groups responsible. To reveal latent networks of cooperating accounts, we propose a novel temporal window approach that relies on account interactions and metadata alone. It detects groups of accounts engaging in behaviours that, in concert, execute different goal-based strategies, which we describe. Our approach is validated against two relevant datasets with ground truth data.