ORGANIZATIONAL BUDGETS, BEHAVIOR AND CAPACITY Although there is limited public information about the size and operations of cyber troop teams, we can begin to assemble a picture of how much money they budget, how they cooperate, and the kinds of organizational capacities and behaviors they assume (Table 4). First, cyber troop organizations spend significant funds on their activities. In many countries, there are reports of government and military budgets assigning specific funds to conduct psychological operations and information warfare via social media platforms—both against foreign governments but also domestically in many authoritarian regimes. Many high-capacity cyber troop teams, such as in the United States, have large research and development funds that have been spent to conduct research on social networks, or to combat misinformation. A growing number of political parties are hiring PR firms or data analytics companies to spread disinformation, launch a political bot or trolling campaign, optimize search results, or spread voter suppression messages. Big spending on these private companies is increasingly a common practice, both in Western democracies and emerging democracies. While all political parties will make expenditures for the digital aspects of their campaign, what makes the data collected in this report unique is that it captures what we know about how political parties spend money specifically on disinformation campaigns. In terms of size, cyber troop teams vary greatly. In some cases, teams are very small, employing just a few workers to propagate ideas and messages across social media over a short period of time, such as during an election campaign. Other teams are larger enterprises that employ hundreds or even thousands of individuals to shape the online information sphere using the various techniques described above. Different cyber troops have different resources, budgets, expenditures, personnel coordination, and skills required to carry out organized manipulation campaigns. By looking comparatively across the trends of cyber troop activity and organization, we can begin to establish their capacity in relation to one another. For this report, we developed a four-point scale: minimallow-medium-high (Table 4). Minimal cyber troop teams are newly formed and often small teams, or teams that were previously active but whose present activities are uncertain. For newly formed teams, they have minimal resources and only apply a few tools or strategies of social media manipulation to a small number of platforms. Minimal teams include: Argentina, Angola, Armenia, Czech Republic, Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Pakistan, South Korea, and Zimbabwe. 16