Abstract

Social media platforms have become key tools for coordinated influence operations, enabling state actors to manipulate public opinion through strategic, collective actions. While previous research has suggested collaboration between states, such research failed to leverage state-of-the-art coordination indicators or control datasets. In this study, we investigate inter-state coordination by analyzing multiple online behavioral traces and using sophisticated coordination detection models. By incorporating a control dataset to differentiate organic user activity from coordinated efforts, our findings reveal no evidence of inter-state coordination. These results challenge earlier claims and underscore the importance of robust methodologies and control datasets in accurately detecting online coordination.

Metadata

publication

In the Proceedings of The Web Conference 2025, 2025

year

2025

publication date

2025/2/24

authors

Valeria Pantè, David Axelrod, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer, Emilio Ferrara, Luca Luceri

link

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17344

resource_link

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17344

journal

In the Proceedings of The Web Conference 2025