A combined synchronization index for evaluating collective action social media

Abstract

Social media has provided a citizen voice, giving rise to grassroots collective action, where users deploy a concerted effort to disseminate online narratives and even carry out offline protests. Sometimes these collective action are aided by inorganic synchronization, which arise from bot actors. It is thus important to identify the synchronicity of emerging discourse on social media and the indications of organic/inorganic activity within the conversations. This provides a way of profiling an event for possibility of offline protests and violence. In this study, we build on past definitions of synchronous activity on social media— simultaneous user action–and develop a Combined Synchronization Index (CSI) which adopts a hierarchical approach in measuring user synchronicity. We apply this index on six political and social activism events on Twitter and analyzed three action types: synchronicity by hashtag, URL and @mentions.The CSI provides an overall quantification of synchronization across all action types within an event, which allows ranking of a spectrum of synchronicity across the six events. Human users have higher synchronous scores than bot users in most events; and bots and humans exhibits the most synchronized activities across all events as compared to other pairs (i.e., bot-bot and human-human). We further rely on the harmony and dissonance of CSI-Network scores with network centrality metrics to observe the presence of organic/inorganic synchronization. We hope this work aids in investigating synchronized action within social media in a collective manner.

Do you hear the people sing? Comparison of synchronized URL and narrative themes in 2020 and 2023 French protests

“…We use URLs as an indicator of synchronization as compared to other tweet artifacts (e.g., hashtag) because URLs show deliberate information referral coordination by pointing to specific pages (Ng and Carley, 2023b ). After which, we construct a network graph that represents the URL synchrony.…”

“…In particular, within online protests, bots have been known to be vocal in calling for action: voicing out against the alcoholic beverage act in Indonesia (Danaditya et al, 2022 ), calling for volunteers to stand up against corruption in Latin America (Savage et al, 2016 ), and supporting climate change activism (Chen et al, 2021 ). The examination of the presence and extent of bot accounts provides a differentiation between the inorganic and organic portions of the discourse, in terms of structure and narratives (Tardelli et al, 2022 ; Ng and Carley, 2023b ), which is helpful in determining the potential violence that might result from the cacophony of information dissemination.…”

Deflating the Chinese balloon: types of Twitter bots in US-China balloon incident

“…In literature, a variety of threshold values have been set, ranging from 0.25 [48] to 0.50 [49] to 0.76 [50]. We adopted the 0.70 value to threshold the likelihood score for marking social media bots to be in consistent with some past work that have used the same algorithm [5,33]: a user with a score above or equal to 0.70 is deemed as a bot and an account below that value is deemed as a human [37]. We denote the likelihood score as P(bot).…”

“…Online political participation by individual users can provide an indication on the perception of political discussions. As individual users share their opinions on global affairs, diplomatic agents can systematically collect these information for campaign analysis [4,5].…”