Towards Statistical Foundations For Detecting Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior On Facebook


May 13, 2021

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Facebook’s community standards disallow “coordinated inauthentic behavior”, stating:

In line with our commitment to authenticity, we don’t allow people to misrepresent themselves on Facebook, use fake accounts, artificially boost the popularity of content, or engage in behaviors designed to enable other violations under our Community Standards. This policy is intended to protect the security of user accounts and our services, and create a space where people can trust the people and communities they interact with.(https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/inauthentic_behavior)

Nevertheless, prior work suggests that this type of behavior is widespread on the platform. Building on this work [1], we seek to develop a technique that may be used to identify coordinated activity based on “near-simultaneous link sharing”. The intuition is that if two entities (Facebook Pages or Groups) routinely share the same URL at roughly the same time, these two entities are coordinated.

You can access the full report here.