This term is unusual on this site, because it is not a word people coined and a dictionary later recorded. It is a category in one company's rulebook: Meta writes that where adversarial threat actors use false identities to engage in sophisticated forms of inauthentic behaviour, they engage in what it has defined as coordinated inauthentic behaviour. [1]
That matters more than it sounds. It means the definition is owned, it can be revised without notice, and other platforms use adjacent phrases for adjacent things.
Why the wording is doing careful work
The category turns on inauthentic, not on coordinated. People coordinating in the open — a campaign, a fan community, a union — are not doing this, however organised or effective they are.
The reason a platform draws the line there is that account provenance is the one thing it can actually see and you cannot. It knows what was created when, from where, and by whom. From outside, all you ever have is the output, and the output of a genuine movement and a manufactured one can be identical.
That asymmetry is the whole practical lesson of this page. The judgement rests on evidence that is structurally unavailable to a reader.
Recognising it
Signals, none of them evidence on their own:
- Accounts created in a cluster, active on one topic and nothing else
- Identical or near-identical phrasing across supposedly unconnected voices
- Posting rhythms that fit one working day rather than many separate lives
- Profiles with no history that predates the campaign
- The same handful of accounts appearing wherever a subject comes up
Every one of these has an ordinary explanation. New accounts are new for mundane reasons; people who read the same sources sound alike; enthusiasts really do turn up wherever their subject appears. Nothing in that list can establish who is behind an account, and treating it as though it can is how real people get accused of being fake.
The honest difficulty
There is no version of this you can confirm from where you are standing, and that is not a limitation of your effort.
The temptation is to reason backwards: the argument feels coordinated, therefore the accounts are inauthentic. That inference is unavailable. Coordination you can sometimes infer; inauthenticity you cannot, because it is a fact about who holds the accounts.
Which makes the accusation cheap and hard to answer. Anyone accused of being part of a network has no way to disprove it, and the accusation reads to onlookers as though it has been established. If you find yourself about to state it as settled, say the honest thing instead: it looks that way, and you cannot know.
What to do
Do not accuse. You cannot establish it, and being wrong does to somebody else exactly what was being done to you.
Describe the pattern, once, for the people reading. Not who these accounts are, but what you have noticed: the same phrasing, the same arrival, the same absence of history.
Send it to the people who can see the metadata. Platforms have reporting categories for this, and it is the one route where the invisible evidence is actually visible. How to report, and what a report does.
Then stop. You are not the audience — the wider readership is — and replying to each account individually spends your evening on the one thing that cannot work. The reasons disengaging works differently at scale apply here more than anywhere.