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

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.

20 pages, 10 images, accepted by The 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM'20)