platforms and governments take legal and regulatory steps to curb disruptive activity on social media. 5. The Growing Importance of the Influence Industry Cyber troops invest significant funds into organizing online manipulation campaigns. Based on preliminary data from a few specific cases around the world, we have already seen tens of millions of dollars being spent on computational propaganda and social media manipulation. While some cyber troop funds are being spent on research and development in military settings, there are an increasing number of purchases being made by political parties to use similar techniques domestically during elections. Often, these funds are used to hire political communication firms that specialize in data-driven targeting and online campaigning. While there are many legitimate businesses that help political parties identify new constituencies and tailor political advertisements to a voter base, there is a growing industry of non-legitimate businesses that use fake social media accounts, online trolls and commentators, and political bots to distort conversations online, help generate a false sense of popularity or political consensus, mainstream extremist opinions, and influence political agendas. REPORT METHODOLOGY The research for this report was completed in three stages. First, we conducted a systematic content analysis of news articles reporting on cyber troop activity in our sample of 48 countries. We then supplemented this data with an in-depth secondary literature review. Using this data, a country profile for each country in this report was drafted by a team of research assistants who then consulted country-specific experts on the accuracy and reliability of the publically available information they had collected. Content analysis is an established research method in communication and media studies (Herring, 2009). It has been used to help understand how the Internet and social media interact with political action, regime transformation, and digital control (Edwards, Howard, & Joyce, 2013; Joyce, Antonio, & Howard, 2013; Strange, Parks, Tierney, Dreher, & Ramachandran, 2013; Woolley, 2016). The qualitative content analysis in this report was conducted to understand the range of state actors who actively use social media to manipulate public opinion, as well as their capacity, strategies and resources. We modeled our content analysis after our 2017 report (Bradshaw & Howard, 2017), using purposive sampling to build a coded spreadsheet of specific variables that appear in news articles. The following keywords were selected and used in combination for our search: astroturf*; bot; Cambridge Analytica; Facebook; fake; fake account; disinformation; government; information warfare; intelligent agent; military; misinformation; 7