Coordinated inauthentic behaviour on Facebook? A typology of manufactured attention

This paper advances the discourse on coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB) on Facebook by extending its study beyond deceptive influence operations. Using techniques developed for its technical analysis, we undertake an empirical study of CIB that surfaces not only such operations but predominantly others, particularly media groups sharing news stories, political activists sharing memes, advertising networks promoting gambling and cyber scams as well as large public groups hijacked to spread ads. Based on these findings, we develop a typology of manufactured attention and make a series of observations concerning the analytical ambiguity of measuring CIB through (timed) link-sharing. The first is the question of when coordinating actors and coordination behaviours cross the line into inauthenticity, which is of methodological interest for platform policies and platform policy observers. The second aspect concerns the evolution of Facebook's (later Meta's) policies with respect to CIB, especially how the platform has defined and described it. We conclude with the observation that Meta's narrowing definition allows for once-erstwhile CIB activities to remain on-platform.