In this episode of the #aBitOfCCS Podcast, Jana Bernhard-Harrer talks to Miriam Milzner and Daniel Thiele from the Weizenbaum Institute’s research group on the Dynamics of Digital Mobilisation about detecting coordinated online manipulation in the era of generative AI.
They introduce coorsim, an open-source R package that identifies semantically similar coordinated posting—addressing a key limitation of traditional tools that rely on identical or near-identical text. Evaluated across 15 international influence operations, coorsim demonstrates how embedding-based similarity and coordination-sensitive clustering can uncover sophisticated campaigns, even when content is linguistically diverse. The episode also explores an example of coordinated activity during the climate summits COP26 and COP27, drawing on over 5.8 million tweets. Miriam and Daniel reflect on how coordinated campaigns shape climate debates—and what this means for research on disinformation in the age of LLMs.
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/thieled/coorsimEmail
Miriam: miriam.milzner@fu-berlin.deEmail
Daniel: daniel.thiele@fu-berlin.de
What is it about computational communication science?