IGF 2021 Town Hall #43
Towards a typology of inauthentic behavior on social media

Different studies and pieces of research have addressed the issue of automated and inauthentic behavior on social media platforms, especially expressions that intend to harm the online public sphere. Inauthentic behavior manifests itself not only in the form of social bots, but also through the use of other strategies such as pages mimicking profiles and sockpuppet profiles. Moreover, new methods are being created faster than the responses to the challenge. Such research agendas are fundamental to create evidence of the diversity of ways to emulate authentic behaviour, both automated or not, which can serve as relevant input to the development of public and platform policies. In that sense, this workshop poses the following questions: is it necessary or desirable to have a typology of inauthentic behavior? If so, which criteria should we use to define these categories? How can platforms incorporate this typology into their content moderation practices?

In this open session, speakers will highlight some of the academic work under development alongside some perspectives from civil society and digital platforms.Furthermore, the workshop proponents seek to engage with the public in order to formulate possible answers to these questions as well as start building a forum for further discussions.

The speakers and moderators will attend IGF remotely, facilitating and participating online. To guarantee broad participation of the public, we will use participatory tools such as Jamboard / Miro, where attendees will be able to input their thoughts and ideas and the moderator will compile them “on the go” during the session. The moderator will also lay out ground rules for interaction through video / voice / on-site in order to ensure equal time of participation as well as diversity of participants. The interaction between speakers will be previously agreed upon in a pre-session meeting organized by the proponents.