What coordinated inauthentic behaviour means

Meta's definition

Meta defines influence operations as coordinated efforts to manipulate or corrupt public debate for a strategic goal ². In its threat reports it describes CIB as such efforts in which fake accounts are central to the operation ¹. Its May 2021 threat report said a CIB network centrally relies on fake accounts to mislead people about who is behind the operation and what it is doing ².

The test is about conduct. Meta says it focuses on behaviour when it investigates and takes down these campaigns, not on the content they post ³. In its December 2022 recap it said its CIB enforcements focus on behaviour and look at a combination of behavioural signals ⁴.

When Meta removes a network, it removes the inauthentic accounts, Pages and Groups and the authentic ones directly involved in the activity. It then reports the takedown in public and shares information with researchers, industry peers and law enforcement, according to its 2021 report ².

Who runs these operations, as Meta reports it

Meta's 2021 report said the operations it removed were foreign and domestic. They were run by governments, commercial entities, politicians, and conspiracy and fringe political groups ². About half of the operations removed since 2017 were run by locals targeting their own countries, according to that report ².

On 15 December 2022 Meta said it had taken down and reported on more than 200 covert influence operations since 2017. These came from 68 countries and targeted more than 100 countries ⁴. The most prolific sources were Russia with 34 networks, Iran with 29 and Mexico with 13 ⁴.

On 3 December 2024 Meta reported 39 Russia networks disrupted since 2017. It named Iran, with 31 CIB networks, and China, with 11, as the next most frequent sources of foreign interference ³.

How other bodies word the rule

Related rules that are not the same thing

Spam and fake engagement sit next to CIB but are listed separately by several platforms. X lists commercially driven spam, inauthentic engagement and coordinated activity as distinct forms of platform manipulation ⁵. TikTok lists covert influence operations, fake engagement and spam as separate items in one set of guidelines ⁶.

Microsoft gives influence operations their own family name, Flood. It uses other family names for state hacking groups, such as Typhoon for China and Blizzard for Russia ⁷. Some influence operations keep a temporary Storm name, such as Storm-1516 and Storm-2035 ⁷. Storm marks an emerging cluster that Microsoft tracks until it reaches high confidence about the origin or identity of the actor ⁷.