Ready-to-(ab)use: From fake account trafficking to coordinated inauthentic behavior on Twitter

Mazza, Michele; Cola, Guglielmo; Tesconi, Maurizio

doi:10.1016/j.osnem.2022.100224

Cited by 13 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Automated accounts mimicking real users have increasingly become the focus of detection efforts, particularly on social media platforms (Gleicher, 2018;Santia et al, 2019). Malicious actors' strategies are not limited to using completely fake accounts; they may also use real user accounts while concealing their identities or intentions to propagate their ideas (Mazza et al, 2022).…”

Section: Computational Detection Of Problematic Actorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Workflow to Detect, Monitor, and Update Lists of Coordinated Social Media Accounts Across Time: The Case of the 2022 Italian Election

Giglietto,

Marino,

Mincigrucci

et al. 2023

Social Media + Society

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Information operations that target public opinion often exploit breaking news, crises, and elections by using coordinated social media actors to disseminate problematic content. These events often reveal the relationships between actors, prompting the creation of lists of malicious actors and news sources. However, relying on outdated lists may underestimate the prevalence and impact of such operations. This article presents a novel workflow to detect, monitor, and update lists of coordinated social media actors during and beyond peak activity periods. Using this approach, known problematic actors are constantly monitored, allowing the detection of new actors and the update of the monitored pool. The workflow was applied to the 2022 Italian snap election, leveraging previous research on coordinated inauthentic behavior during the 2018 and 2019 Italian elections. The initial list of 435 coordinated accounts was monitored, surfacing 1,022 overly shared or commented political posts, 272 coordinated links, and detecting 66 political and 554 generic coordinated accounts not previously listed. Three case studies were identified: one politically motivated, one click-economy driven, and one religiously motivated operation. The article discusses the implications of this approach, its limitations, and potential future work.

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Section: Computational Detection Of Problematic Actorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Workflow to Detect, Monitor, and Update Lists of Coordinated Social Media Accounts Across Time: The Case of the 2022 Italian Election

Giglietto,

Marino,

Mincigrucci

et al. 2023

Social Media + Society

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“…In this context, the broad definition of “fake” and “news” (Caplan et al, 2018 ; HLEG EU Commission, 2018 ) encouraged the development of alternative terminologies to narrow the issue (Wardle and Derakhshan, 2017 ). For example, terms such as “fake news commercially motivated” (Silverman, 2017 ) have described CIB as aiming at economic fraud (Mazza et al, 2022 ). Other authors have expanded the meaning of the term “fake,” including problematic information (Jack, 2017 ), while others have looked at contact points among similar occurrences.…”

Section: Cib Operations and Expansionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the last years, interdisciplinary studies have used sophisticated mixed methods (Amaturo and Punziano, 2021 ) to identify online communication issues, including artificial intelligence (Murero, 2020 ) to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic (manipulating) coordination of online campaigns (Vo et al, 2017 ; Jiang et al, 2021 ; Mazza et al, 2022 ).…”

Section: Challenges In Cib Identification (And Removal)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To overcome this limit, in the present article, CIB dynamics were observed in different contexts to identify emerging threats to online/offline communication internationally. The manipulative influence of CIBs is rapidly growing in political debates (Howard et al, 2018 ; Giglietto et al, 2019 ) and online economic frauds (Cinelli et al, 2022 ; Mazza et al, 2022 ). Research on CIB and public health issues is rare and should be further developed in different contexts.…”

Section: Final Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Coordinated inauthentic behavior: An innovative manipulation tactic to amplify COVID-19 anti-vaccine communication outreach via social media

Murero

2023

Front. Sociol.

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Coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) is a manipulative communication tactic that uses a mix of authentic, fake, and duplicated social media accounts to operate as an adversarial network (AN) across multiple social media platforms. The article aims to clarify how CIB's emerging communication tactic “secretly” exploits technology to massively harass, harm, or mislead the online debate around crucial issues for society, like the COVID-19 vaccination. CIB's manipulative operations could be one of the greatest threats to freedom of expression and democracy in our society. CIB campaigns mislead others by acting with pre-arranged exceptional similarity and “secret” operations. Previous theoretical frameworks failed to evaluate the role of CIB on vaccination attitudes and behavior. In light of recent international and interdisciplinary CIB research, this study critically analyzes the case of a COVID-19 anti-vaccine adversarial network removed from Meta at the end of 2021 for brigading. A violent and harmful attempt to tactically manipulate the COVID-19 vaccine debate in Italy, France, and Germany. The following focal issues are discussed: (1) CIB manipulative operations, (2) their extensions, and (3) challenges in CIB's identification. The article shows that CIB acts in three domains: (i) structuring inauthentic online communities, (ii) exploiting social media technology, and (iii) deceiving algorithms to extend communication outreach to unaware social media users, a matter of concern for the general audience of CIB-illiterates. Upcoming threats, open issues, and future research directions are discussed.

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“…We may refer to online political astroturfing, that was defined as hidden information campaigns in which a political actor mimics genuine citizen behavior by incentivizing agents to spread information online (Schoch et al, 2022). An other relevant concept is trolling, the malicious behavior of trolls, fake accounts operated manually, behavior intended to disrupt interactions, annoy interaction partners, and draw them into a pointless arguments (Coles & West, 2016;Coles & West, 2016, as cited in Pamment et al, 2018Mazza, Cola & Tesconi, 2022). We have to mention, also, the activity of bots, computerized "actors" in the digital environment that, at least in part, mimic human behavior (Pamment et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Use of Facebook Accounts with Inauthentic Behavior in Elections: The Romanian Presidential Election Case

Oprea

2024

Ro. J. Comm. & PR

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Astroturfing, trolling, bots, false amplifiers and social media accounts with inauthentic behavior are used in online political communication even if they have a real-world dangerous effect on democratic systems. Some of these activities are involving users that are over-proportionally active in relation to the mean. This explanatory research sought to determine whether such hyperactive users are utilized to share political posts to create an impression of popularity for a specific political message and, thus, to influence the recommendation algorithms of social networks in order to increase the exposure of political messages. In this study, I analyzed the most shared posts during the election campaign on the official Facebook pages of the first three ranked candidates in the 2019 Romanian presidential election. The research revealed an average of 18.3% of shares were made by hyperactive users on their own timeline or in different Facebook groups, with users that shared the same post for 69 times. Furthermore, I identified some of the characteristics of hyperactive users’ accounts based on their public social media profile, which may helps understand the specifics of these accounts. The results show that election communication involves activities considered by Facebook to be a practice of „manipulating public opinion“ and of „manipulating political discussion“ (Weedon et al., 2017, p. 5).

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Ready-to-(ab)use: From fake account trafficking to coordinated inauthentic behavior on Twitter

Cited by 13 publications

References 27 publications

A Workflow to Detect, Monitor, and Update Lists of Coordinated Social Media Accounts Across Time: The Case of the 2022 Italian Election

A Workflow to Detect, Monitor, and Update Lists of Coordinated Social Media Accounts Across Time: The Case of the 2022 Italian Election

Coordinated inauthentic behavior: An innovative manipulation tactic to amplify COVID-19 anti-vaccine communication outreach via social media

Use of Facebook Accounts with Inauthentic Behavior in Elections: The Romanian Presidential Election Case

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