Digital Polarization Index (DPI): An Operational Framework for Detecting and Characterizing Coordinated Operations in Latin America

Since X-Twitter suppressed public access to engagement metrics in February 2023, classical models for detecting coordinated operations lost viability. Astroturfing is one modality among several, alongside narrative saturation and targeted amplification, requiring frameworks that use the structural and behavioral signals still available. This article proposes the Digital Polarization Index (DPI; in Spanish, Índice de Polarización Digital), a six-stage operational framework classifying each unique account into four categories (Trolls, Activists, Public opinion, Neutral), reporting four inauthenticity dimensions (D1–D4) and assigning typological labels with scale and intensity qualifiers. The framework applies to political conversation directed at an identifiable actor that has reached trending status on X. Validation covers ten political cases in Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and Mexico (28,007 accounts; 56,623 mentions), with two external contrasts: Botometer-Lite, kappa = 0.368, and Platform Sentiment, kappa = −0.015, the latter supporting a Stance variable directional toward the target actor. The three modalities are differentially activated, though not separable beyond chance. Stance agreement with independent human annotation reaches kappa = 0.411 against kappa = 0.752 between annotators. Four prespecified non-political trending corpora fall outside that scope and receive at least one operational label in three of four, bounding the attribution the framework supports.