2. Government Agencies Tasked with Combatting Fake News The growing threat of fake news proliferation—whether real or perceived—is now a significant concern for governments around the world. Since 2016, over 30 countries have introduced legislation designed to combat fake news on the Internet (Bradshaw, Neudert, & Howard, Forthcoming). At the same time, several democracies have established new government agencies or mandated existing organizations to combat fake news and foreign influence operations. The response often involves generating and disseminating counter-narratives or creating reporting, flagging, and fact checking portals to support citizen awareness and engagement. Authoritarian regimes have also developed responses ostensibly to combat the spread of fake news; though they might also be used to stifle speech. In many cases these task forces have become a new tool to legitimize further censorship, and are often used in combination with media law and surveillance capabilities, computational propaganda campaigns, and Internet blocking or filtering to limit freedom of expression and shape online public discourse. 3. Disinformation on Chat Applications Chat applications such as WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram are an important medium by which individuals share news and information, coordinate political activity, and discuss politics. In this year’s report, there is growing evidence of disinformation campaigns taking place on chat applications. We have seen evidence of social media manipulation campaigns on chat applications in around a fifth of the countries in our sample, many of which are from the Global South, where large public groups on chat applications are a widespread phenomenon. 4. Current and Emerging Strategies for Social Media Manipulation Government cyber troops make use of a variety of tactics and techniques, and every political campaign uses a different set of tools for the job. Most cyber troops will use online commentators and fake social media accounts to spread pro-government or pro-party messages to populations both domestically and abroad. Political bots are used by cyber troops to flood hashtags with automated messages promoting or attacking particular politicians, or to fake a follower-base on social media. Increasingly they are also used to strategically post particular keywords, in order to game algorithms and cause certain content to trend. Bots are also being used to report legitimate content and accounts on a mass scale, so that social media platforms automatically suspend accounts or remove content until it can be reviewed by a human moderator. We suspect that all these subversive behaviors will continue to evolve as 6