coordinated inauthentic behavior

On the internet, anyone can pretend to be someone else. Individual fake accounts are not a new problem. Coordinated inauthentic behavior — CIB for short — is something different: many such accounts act simultaneously and in coordination to create the impression that a particular opinion is widely held. The deception lies not only in who the accounts are, but in how many there appear to be. The goal is almost always political: inflating approval, discrediting opponents, or deepening social division. The term was introduced in 2018 by Meta — the company behind Facebook and Instagram — and has since become firmly established in the jargon surrounding disinformation.

Why coordinated deception is more effective than individual lies

People take their cues from other people. When a post has thousands of likes or an opinion keeps appearing again and again, it seems more credible — even if you haven’t verified the content yourself. In social psychology, this effect is called social proof. CIB deliberately exploits it.

A single fake account is easy to ignore. A thousand accounts spreading the same narrative and commenting on each other feel like a genuine movement. Platforms like X (formerly Twitter) or TikTok amplify this further: their algorithms reward content with high engagement, regardless of whether that engagement is real or simulated. This allows an artificially inflated debate to spill over into actual public discourse.

CIB is especially dangerous around elections. Studies on the 2016 and 2020 US elections as well as the Brexit referendum show that coordinated campaigns specifically targeted voter groups with emotionally charged or false content — often automated via so-called bots, software programs that pose as human users.

How a CIB campaign is structured

A typical campaign consists of several layers. At the base are hundreds or thousands of accounts, either fully automated or operated by real, often paid, people. These accounts share the same content, like each other, and flood comment sections. This pushes the posts up in algorithms.

A second layer consists of so-called amplifiers: accounts with larger followings that pick up and spread the artificially boosted content — sometimes unknowingly. In the end, real people express real outrage over a debate that was originally stirred up artificially. The line between genuine and staged opinion becomes blurred.

Incidentally, the word “inauthentic” in the name does not necessarily refer to the content of a statement. A claim can be factually true and still be spread inauthentically — namely when the senders pretend to be something they are not. CIB is an attack on the origin of an opinion, not necessarily on its truthfulness.

CIB in reports, products, and political debates

Meta regularly publishes reports describing which CIB networks it has removed from its platforms. These have included campaigns run from Russia, China, Iran, and numerous other countries — but also ones operated by PR firms on behalf of Western governments. CIB is therefore not a phenomenon confined to a single side.

In the tech industry, the term is closely tied to the issue of AI misuse. Language models — programs that can generate human-sounding text — drastically lower the effort required for CIB. What once took a team of writers can now be produced by a single person with the right tool in minutes. This is why regulators in the EU, under the Digital Services Act, are discussing how platforms should better detect and report CIB campaigns.

In everyday life, the term mostly appears in news reports following elections or political crises. When media outlets write that a social network has removed a “network of coordinated accounts,” they almost always mean CIB. Awareness of the term helps make sense of such reports — and encourages a more critical response to content that goes viral.