CooRTweet

Nicola Righetti, Paul Balluff

Coordinated behavior is a relevant social media strategy employed for political astroturfing (Keller et al., 2020), the spread of inappropriate content online (Giglietto et al., 2020), and activism. Software for academic research and investigative journalism has been developed in the last few years to detect coordinated behavior, such as the CooRnet R package (Giglietto, Righetti, Rossi, 2020), which detects Coordinated Link Sharing Behavior (CLSB) and Coordinated Image Sharing on Facebook and Instagram (CooRnet website), and the Coordination Network Toolkit by Timothy Graham (Graham, QUT Digital Observatory, 2020).

The CooRTweet package builds on the existing literature on coordinated behavior and the experience of previous software, particularly CooRnet, to provide R users with an easy-to-use tool to detect various coordinated networks on Twitter and any other social media. It further opens up the possibility of cross-platform analysis.

Install

Install from CRAN

r install.packages("CooRTweet")

Quick Start

The package is compatible with any data, provided that it is formatted appropriately. It offers comprehensive support for data obtained from the Twitter Academic API in the JSON format. This format is generated by the function get_all_tweets from the R package academictwitteR, which simultaneously retrieves tweets and user information. Additionally, the simple function prep_data aids in formatting the data as required by the package.

For a walk-through see the vignette.

Citation

Righetti, N., & Balluff, P. (2025). CooRTweet: A Generalized R Software for Coordinated Network Detection. Computational Communication Research, 7(1), 1.

References

Righetti, N., Kulichkina, A., Almeida Paroni, B., Cseri, Z. F., Aguirre, S. I., & Maikovska, K. (2025). Mainstreaming and transnationalization of anti-gender ideas through social media: the case of CitizenGO. Information, Communication & Society, 1-24.

Barrie, C., & Ho, J. C. T. (2021). academictwitteR: an R package to access the Twitter Academic Research Product Track v2 API endpoint. Journal of Open Source Software, 6(62), 3272, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03272

Giglietto, F., Righetti, N., & Rossi, L. (2020). CooRnet. detect coordinated link sharing behavior on social media. R package version 1.5.0. https://github.com/fabiogiglietto/CooRnet

Giglietto, F., Righetti, N., Rossi, L., & Marino, G. (2020). It takes a village to manipulate the media: coordinated link sharing behavior during 2018 and 2019 Italian elections. Information, Communication & Society, 23(6), 867-891. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1739732

Graham, Timothy; QUT Digital Observatory; (2020): Coordination Network Toolkit. Queensland University of Technology. (Software) https://doi.org/10.25912/RDF_1632782596538

Keller, F. B., Schoch, D., Stier, S., & Yang, J. (2020). Political astroturfing on Twitter: How to coordinate a disinformation campaign. Political Communication, 37(2), 256-280. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1661888

Kulichkina, A., Righetti, N., & Waldherr, A. (2024). Protest and repression on social media: Pro-Navalny and pro-government mobilization dynamics and coordination patterns on Russian Twitter. New Media & Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/146144482412541.

Righetti, N., Giglietto, F., Kakavand, A. E., Kulichkina, A., Marino, G., & Terenzi, M. (2022). Political advertisement and coordinated behavior on social media in the lead-up to the 2021 German federal elections. Dusseldorf: Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia, 6. https://www.medienanstalt-nrw.de/fileadmin/userupload/NeueWebsite0120/ZumNachlesen/BTW22Political_Advertisement.PDF

Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the vera.ai project, funded by the European Union through the Horizon Europe program (Grant Agreement ID 101070093).