Crude, Commercial, and Self-Referential: Chinese-Language Coordinated Activity in Japanese-Language X

2026-09-28

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of characterization regarding malicious coordinated behavior and ordinary user responses in existing research. Leveraging a large-scale dataset comprising 730,000 accounts and 495 million posts from platform X, this work integrates large-scale data mining, text duplication detection, and longitudinal quantitative analysis to provide the first quantitative mapping of the distributional characteristics and user response mechanisms underlying crude Chinese-language coordination campaigns within Japanese information streams. The findings reveal that most coordinating accounts retain traces of automation while producing predominantly non-political content. Furthermore, large-scale cascades primarily stem from internal self-referential interactions rather than external diffusion. These results uncover a novel propagation paradigm for cross-lingual coordinated inauthentic behavior, offering critical insights into how such campaigns operate across linguistic boundaries on social media platforms.

Abstract

Malicious coordination has long been regarded as a principal source of information ecosystem pollution. Here, we focus on crude, text-repetition-based coordination. As the demand for mitigating its dissemination has grown, scholars have studied such coordination, focusing especially on bot detection. Few studies, however, have characterized malicious coordination per se or examined how it elicits reactions from general users. Leveraging a dataset of 734,173 Chinese-language coordinated accounts and around 495 million coordinated posts published between May 2024 and March 2026, this study analyzes the characteristics of coordinated behavior and how general users react to coordinated posts. We report three findings: (1) most coordinated accounts are crude and retain the classic marks of automation, and the same criterion applied to Japanese-language accounts over the same month yields a share six times lower; (2) their content is overwhelmingly non-political; (3) regarding their reach, most reactions within large observable cascades originate from coordinated accounts themselves, while posts classified as potentially harmful or illegal material receive a comparatively high proportion of reactions from outside the Chinese-dominant population. We provide a longitudinal quantitative map of crude Chinese-language coordination appearing in X's Japanese-classified stream.

Problem

• malicious coordination
• coordinated inauthentic behavior
• information ecosystem
• social media manipulation
• cross-lingual activity

Innovation

• Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior
• Cross-lingual Analysis
• Text-repetition Coordination
• Information Cascades
• Social Media Mining