A group of users
Actors
Actors are the individuals or entities engaged in coordinated behavior. Their attributes help characterize whether coordination is authentic or inauthentic, bottom-up or top-down, small-scale or large-scale.
Conceptual Framework
This page collects the survey definition of coordinated online behavior, its core components, and the dimensions used throughout the survey.
Our definition
Coordinated Online Behavior
A group of users who perform synergic actions in pursuit of an intent.
Survey definitionSynergic actions
Actions
Actions are the practical means that allow actors to coordinate. They are visible digital traces of coordination and are the component on which most detection methods are built.
Pursuit of an intent
Intent
Intent is the objective that actors pursue when they coordinate. It can be explicit or implicit, shared or concealed, and it contributes to whether the coordination is considered harmful.
Definitions
Section titled “Definitions” Offline coordination 2 definitions
Coordination
The additional information processing performed when multiple, connected actors pursue goals that a single actor pursuing the same goals would not perform.
Coordination components
A set of two or more actors who perform activities in order to achieve goals.
Survey definition 1 definitions
Coordinated online behavior
A group of users who perform synergic actions in pursuit of an intent.
Meta/Facebook/Instagram 4 definitions
Coordinated inauthentic behavior
Groups of pages or people working together to mislead others on who they are or what they are doing.
Coordinated inauthentic behavior
The use of multiple Facebook or Instagram assets (accounts, pages, groups, or events), working in concert to engage in inauthentic behavior, i.e., to mislead people or Facebook, where the use of fake accounts is central to the operation.
Coordinated social harm
Networks of primarily authentic users who organize to systematically violate policies to cause harm on or off the platform.
Coordinated mass harassment
Coordinated efforts of mass harassment that target individuals at heightened risk of offline harm.
Twitter/X 2 definitions
Information operation
People directly involved in manipulation that can be reliably attributed to a government or state-linked actor.
Coordinated harmful activity
Groups, movements, or campaigns that are engaged in coordinated activity resulting in harm on and off of Twitter.
Reddit 1 definitions
Content manipulation
Things like spam, community interference, vote manipulation, and other attempts to artificially promote content.
TikTok 1 definitions
Covert Influence Operations
Coordinated, inauthentic behaviors where networks of accounts work together to mislead people or our systems and try to strategically influence public discussion. This may include attempting to undermine the results of an election, influencing parts of an armed conflict, or shaping public discussion of social issues.
Operational Definitions
Examples of operational definitions used in recent academic literature. No definition is general enough to comprehensively describe coordinated online behavior. However, each definition grasps one or more relevant properties (highlighted in bold) that we leverage in our framework.
10rows
data/source/tables/tab_notions.csvOpen source CSV
| Reference | Definition |
|---|---|
| Unexpected, suspicious, or exceptional similarity between a number of users | |
| The number of times two accounts behaved similarly, such as when they repeatedly retweet the same post | |
| The act of making people and/or things be involved in an organized cooperation | |
| Many instances of a tweet-behavior, i.e. tweeted hashtag [...] within a small predetermined time window | |
| Anomalous levels of coincidental behavior | |
| Users [that] take the same actions within minutes of one another | |
| Accounts that co-appear, or are synchronized in time | |
| [Users exhibiting a] surprising lack of independence | |
| Coordination between users implies a shared intent | |
| A group of people who want to convey specific information to an audience |