Towards Detecting Inauthentic Coordination in Twitter Likes Data

Abstract: Social media feeds typically favor posts according to user engagement. The most ubiquitous type of engagement (and the type we study) is likes. Users customarily take engagement metrics such as likes as a neutral proxy for quality and authority. This incentivizes like manipulation to influence public opinion through coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB). CIB targeted at likes is largely unstudied as collecting suitable data about users' liking behavior is non-trivial. This paper contributes a scripted algorithm to collect suitable liking data from Twitter and a collected 30 day dataset of liking data from the Danish political Twittersphere #dkpol, over which we analyze the script's performance. Using only the binary matrix of users and the tweets they liked, we identify large clusters of perfectly correlated users, and discuss our findings in relation to CIB.