Decoding The Playbook: Multi-Modal Characterization of Coordinated Influence Operations on Indian Social Media

Abstract

Manipulation of online discourse through organized disinformation and propaganda campaigns is a threat to information integrity and democratic dialogue. Taking cues from on-ground reports and recent literature on online trend manipulation in the Indian political landscape, we argue that organizing and consequently detecting influence operations is a multi-modal problem, where coordination is organized around different modalities like tweet , retweet , image and temporal . In this paper, we examine three case studies of prominent hashtag campaigns on Indian Twitter. Building on prior coordination detection methods, we identify communities of coordinated users across each of the four modalities. An in-depth analysis of the coordinated communities offers unique insights into the playbook of coordination strategies employed in the Indian context. We find that tweet coordination is used for hashtag trending, while retweet coordination aids in amplifying messaging from influential right-wing accounts. Moreover, we find distinct roles of users across modalities, where users that disseminate content through tweet and image coordination ( disseminators ) are independent of users that amplify content through retweet coordination ( amplifiers ), suggesting the existence of distinct coordination campaigns and objectives within influence operations. We conclude by highlighting the multi-modal approach to coordination for comprehensively characterizing influence operations, the drawbacks of temporal filtering in coordination, and the transferability and implications of our findings.