Coordinated behavior is a relevant social media strategy employed for political astroturfing (Keller et al., 2020), the spread of inappropriate content online (Giglietto et al., 2020), and activism. Software for academic research and investigative journalism has been developed in the last few years to detect coordinated behavior, such as the CooRnet R package (Giglietto, Righetti, Rossi, 2020), which detects Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior (CLSB) and Coordinated Image Sharing on Facebook and Instagram (CooRnet website), and the Coordination Network Toolkit by Timothy Graham (Graham, QUT Digital Observatory, 2020).
The CooRTweet package builds on the existing literature on coordinated behavior and the experience of previous software, particularly CooRnet, to provide R users with an easy-to-use tool to detect various coordinated networks on Twitter and any other social media. It further opens up the possibility of cross-platform analysis.
The package is compatible with any data, provided that it is formatted appropriately. It offers comprehensive support for data obtained from the Twitter Academic API in the JSON format. This format is generated by the function get_all_tweets from the R package academictwitteR, which simultaneously retrieves tweets and user information. Additionally, the simple function prep_data aids in formatting the data as required by the package.
For a walk-through see the vignette.
Righetti N., Balluff P. (2023). CooRTweet: Coordinated Networks Detection on Social Media. R package version 2.0.0. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=CooRTweet.
Barrie, C., & Ho, J. C. T. (2021). academictwitteR: an R package to access the Twitter Academic Research Product Track v2 API endpoint. Journal of Open Source Software, 6(62), 3272, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03272
Giglietto, F., Righetti, N., & Rossi, L. (2020). CooRnet. detect coordinated link sharing behavior on social media. R package version 1.5.0. https://github.com/fabiogiglietto/CooRnet
Giglietto, F., Righetti, N., Rossi, L., & Marino, G. (2020). It takes a village to manipulate the media: coordinated link sharing behavior during 2018 and 2019 Italian elections. Information, Communication & Society, 23(6), 867-891. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1739732
Graham, Timothy; QUT Digital Observatory; (2020): Coordination Network Toolkit. Queensland University of Technology. (Software) https://doi.org/10.25912/RDF_1632782596538
Keller, F. B., Schoch, D., Stier, S., & Yang, J. (2020). Political astroturfing on Twitter: How to coordinate a disinformation campaign. Political Communication, 37(2), 256-280. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1661888
Kulichkina, Aytalina, Nicola Righetti, and Annie Waldherr. 2022. Pro-Democracy and Pro-Regime Coordination in Russian Protests: The Role of Social Media. In 72nd Annual ICA Conference, One World, One Network‽.