A Combined Synchronization Index for Grassroots Activism on Social Media

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical Combined Synchronization Index (CSI) to measure and analyze the synchronicity of social media activity, distinguishing between organic and inorganic coordination in grassroots activism on Twitter.

Contribution

It develops a novel hierarchical CSI metric for quantifying social media synchronicity and applies it to real-world activism events, revealing insights into user coordination patterns.

Findings

Humans generally show higher synchronization scores than bots.

Bots and humans exhibit the most synchronized activities among all pairs.

CSI scores correlate with network centrality metrics indicating organic/inorganic activity.

Abstract

Social media has provided a citizen voice, giving rise to grassroots collective action, where users deploy a concerted effort to disseminate online narratives and even carry out offline protests. Sometimes these collective action are aided by inorganic synchronization, which arise from bot actors. It is thus important to identify the synchronicity of emerging discourse on social media and the indications of organic/inorganic activity within the conversations. This provides a way of profiling an event for possibility of offline protests and violence. In this study, we build on past definitions of synchronous activity on social media -- simultaneous user action -- and develop a Combined Synchronization Index (CSI) which adopts a hierarchical approach in measuring user synchronicity. We apply this index on six political and social activism events on Twitter and analyzed three action types: synchronicity by hashtag, URL and @mentions.The CSI provides an overall quantification of synchronization across all action types within an event, which allows ranking of a spectrum of synchronicity across the six events. Human users have higher synchronous scores than bot users in most events; and bots and humans exhibits the most synchronized activities across all events as compared to other pairs (i.e., bot-bot and human-human). We further rely on the harmony and dissonance of CSI-Network scores with network centrality metrics to observe the presence of organic/inorganic synchronization. We hope this work aids in investigating synchronized action within social media in a collective manner.