Multimodal Coordinated Online Behavior: Trade-offs and Strategies

Coordinated online behavior, which spans from beneficial collective actions to harmful manipulation such as disinformation campaigns, has become a key focus in digital ecosystem analysis. Traditional methods often rely on monomodal approaches, focusing on single types of interactions like co-retweets or co-hashtags, or consider multiple modalities independently of each other. However, these approaches may overlook the complex dynamics inherent in multimodal coordination. This study compares different ways of operationalizing the detection of multimodal coordinated behavior. It examines the trade-off between weakly and strongly integrated multimodal models, highlighting the balance between capturing broader coordination patterns and identifying tightly coordinated behavior. By comparing monomodal and multimodal approaches, we assess the unique contributions of different data modalities and explore how varying implementations of multimodality impact detection outcomes. Our findings reveal that not all the modalities provide distinct insights, but that with a multimodal approach we can get a more comprehensive understanding of coordination dynamics. This work enhances the ability to detect and analyze coordinated online behavior, offering new perspectives for safeguarding the integrity of digital platforms.