Uncovering Coordinated Networks on Social Media.

Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general network-based framework to uncover groups of accounts that are likely coordinated. The proposed method construct coordination networks based on arbitrary behavioral traces shared among accounts. We present five case studies of influence campaigns in the diverse contexts of U.S. elections, Hong Kong protests, the Syrian civil war, and cryptocurrencies. In each of these cases, we detect networks of coordinated Twitter accounts by examining their identities, images, hashtag sequences, retweets, and temporal patterns. The proposed framework proves to be broadly applicable to uncover different kinds of coordination across information warfare scenarios.