The article "Temporal dynamics of coordinated online behavior: stability, archetypes, and influence" was published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) by a group of scientists led by Stefano Cresci of the National Research Council of Pisa's Institute of Informatics and Telematics (CNR-IIT). The paper addresses the issue of "coordinated behavior" among internet users, with a focus on how this pollutes online political debates, particularly during election campaigns. In recent years, social media campaigns have emerged as the primary tool for shaping public opinion in a variety of societal contexts, reaching a large number of people, citizens, and voters with the intent of manipulating (sometimes maliciously) their decisions and choices. This type of communication is frequently based on a mix of real and fake accounts that work together on a large scale to effectively spread false or biased content at high speed, leveraging a "equal" dynamic between people. The study's novelty stems from the use of temporal networks to analyze the phenomenon, i.e. analyzing how online behaviors change over time in order to identify communities of users who take coordinated actions to "orient" the debate. The study also discovered that different types of users exhibit very different behaviors.
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