citizens to report such information to the government or law enforcement agencies. For
example, Colombia started a fact-checking imitative for content being shared on WhatsApp,
and leading up to the 2018 elections in Italy, law enforcement launched a portal that allowed
citizens to report fake news they came across on social media. While there have been many
positive responses by governments to begin taking steps to combat computational propaganda,
in other instances these applications or portals are used to legitimize censorship or launch
astroturfing campaigns. In Brazil, Ecuador, Israel and Serbia we have seen cyber troops create
applications or portals to launch astroturfing campaigns.
Finally, other evidence of political communication strategies we identified involves targeting
advertisements to specific segments of the population using demographic information or data
on user attitudes, or gaming algorithms through search engine optimization techniques to get
content to appear higher in search results. The range of platforms on which disinformation is
carried out is also growing, with evidence of cyber troop activity on chat applications or other
platforms (Instagram, LINE, SnapChat, Telegram, Tinder, WeChat, WhatsApp) in 12 of 48
countries examined.
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