Measuring coordinated vs. spontaneous activity in online social movements

Social media platforms provide people all over the world with an unprecedented ability to organize around social and political causes. However, these same platforms enable institutional and organized actors to engineer fabricated social movements to advance their agenda. These “astroturfing” or “false amplification” phenomenons leverage a variety of of tools and techniques, ranging from fully automated bot activity to accounts manned by extrinsically motivated (e.g. compensated) human operators. These campaigns also range from simple spam operations to sophisticated efforts involving numerous orchestrated accounts, sometimes coordinated across linguistic and cultural clusters. While the former category is straightforward to analyze via data mining methods, sophisticated fabricated campaigns in the latter category are engineered to mask their true nature from the public.

Working from the proposition that a large number of accounts controlled by a small number of coordinated entities will lack the behavioral diversity of a similar number of accounts controlled by uncoordinated individual actors, we propose a framework of signals (metrics) along three dimensions:

Network: how accounts are connected to one another, and the clusters they form within the online conversation,
Temporal: patterns of messaging across time in the online conversation,
Semantic: an observation of the diversity of topics and meaning throughout the online conversation.

We test this framework on three case studies: the online conversation on #ColumbianChemicals in the U.S., the international discussion of the #DopingLeaks event, and an analysis of political discussions in Venezuela. In all three cases, we find what we assess to be anomalous, fabricated behavior on at least one dimension.

社交媒体平台为全球范围内的民众提供了前所未有的能力，使他们能够围绕社会和政治议题进行组织。然而，这些平台同样使得机构和有组织的行动者能够策划虚构的社会运动，以推进其议程。这些所谓的“伪草根”或“虚假放大”现象，利用了多种工具和技术，从完全自动化的机器人活动到由外部动机驱动（例如，获得报酬）的人类操作员管理的账户，不一而足。这些运动的形式也各不相同，从简单的垃圾邮件操作到涉及众多协调账户的复杂努力，有时甚至跨越语言和文化群体进行协调。尽管前者可以通过数据挖掘方法直接分析，但后者涉及的复杂虚构运动被精心设计以掩盖其真实性质，避免公众察觉。

基于大量账户由少数协调实体控制，其行为多样性将低于同等数量的账户由非协调的个体行动者控制的假设，我们提出了一套包含三个维度的信号（指标）框架：

网络：账户之间的连接方式以及它们在在线对话中形成的集群；
时间：在线对话中随时间变化的通讯模式；
语义：对在线对话中主题和意义的多样性的观察。

我们在三个案例研究中测试了这一框架：美国关于#ColumbianChemicals的在线对话、关于#DopingLeaks事件的国际讨论以及对委内瑞拉政治讨论的分析。在所有三个案例中，我们都发现了至少在一个维度上被认为异常的、虚构的行为。