Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB)

Coordinated inauthentic behavior, often abbreviated CIB, is a trust-and-safety term for networked deception campaigns in which fake accounts are central to the operation and the operators use adversarial methods to hide their coordination and evade detection. The phrase was coined by Meta in 2018 and has since become the standard industry vocabulary for organised influence operations, encompassing efforts run by governments, companies and non-state groups, with state-directed cases treated as a distinct, more serious subcategory.

The concept matters on Reddit because the platform's pseudonymous accounts, vote-ranked content and topical communities can be exploited to make coordinated messaging look like spontaneous, organic opinion. Reddit has identified and removed networks of accounts linked to influence operations, and it publishes transparency reporting on such activity. Naming the behaviour as coordinated and inauthentic, rather than judging each post in isolation, reflects how modern platform enforcement increasingly targets the pattern and the actors behind a campaign rather than only the individual pieces of content, which is essential when each separate post may look unremarkable on its own.