Online Coordination: Methods and Comparative Case Studies of Coordinated Groups across Four Events in the United States
Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Kathleen M. Carley

TL;DR
This paper develops a method to detect online coordinated groups by optimizing time window selection and applies it to four major US events, revealing coordination patterns and themes across different dimensions.
Contribution
It introduces an optimal window size method for coordination detection and provides a comparative analysis of coordination across four significant events.
Findings
Different coordination patterns identified across events
Themes and narratives associated with coordinated groups
Enhanced detection accuracy over existing methods
Abstract
Coordinated groups of user accounts working together in online social media can be used to manipulate the online discourse and thus is an important area of study. In this study, we work towards a general theory of coordination. There are many ways to coordinate groups online: semantic, social, referral and many more. Each represents a coordination dimension, where the more dimensions of coordination are present for one event, the stronger the coordination present. We build on existing approaches that detect coordinated groups by identifying high levels of synchronized actions within a specified time window. A key concern with this approach is the selection of the time window. We propose a method that selects the optimal window size to accurately capture local coordination while avoiding the capture of coincidental synchronicity. With this enhanced method of coordination detection, we…
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