Coordinated Behavior on Social Media in 2019 UK General Election

Coordinated online behaviors are an essential part of infor- mation and influence operations, as they allow a more effec- tive disinformation’s spread. Most studies on coordinated be- haviors involved manual investigations, and the few existing computational approaches make bold assumptions or over- simplify the problem to make it tractable. Here, we propose a new network-based framework for un- covering and studying coordinated behaviors on social media. Our research extends existing systems and goes beyond lim- iting binary classifications of coordinated and uncoordinated behaviors. It allows to expose different coordination patterns and to estimate the degree of coordination that characterizes diverse communities. We apply our framework to a dataset collected during the 2019 UK General Election, detecting and characterizing coordinated communities that participated in the electoral debate. Our work conveys both theoretical and practical implications and provides more nuanced and fine- grained results for studying online information manipulation.