This methodology has allowed us to successfully capture a wide range of public documents that shed light on the global distribution of organized manipulation campaigns. There are almost certainly cyber troop operations that have not been publicly documented. While this report is in no way intended to provide a complete picture of how state actors are operating in this space, we can confidently begin to build a bigger picture by piecing together a wide array of publically available information. ORGANIZATIONAL FORM Cyber troop activity takes on a variety of organizational forms. Indeed, there are many types of actors who leverage social media to set political agendas and propagate values or ideas. In this report, we focus specifically on cyber troop activity: that is government or political party use of social media to manipulate public opinion. One important feature of the organization of cyber troops is that they often work in conjunction with private industry, civil society organizations, Internet subcultures, youth groups, hacker collectives, fringe movements, social media influencers, and volunteers who ideologically support their cause. While this coordination can also occur informally as a result of overlapping ideologies or values, we have captured examples where formal coordination has occurred. For example, formal organization between industry and political parties appears to have occurred in Austria, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Philippines, Poland, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, where political parties and campaign managers have directly hired PR or consulting firms to help spread computational propaganda during elections. Another example of formal coordination that takes place between cyber troops is with volunteers. In countries such as Azerbaijan, Israel, Russia, and Turkey, tech savvy youth are actively recruited by cyber troop organizations to support social media manipulation efforts. We have documented evidence of the form that cyber troop activity takes in order to comparatively examine the actor types involved (see Table 1). In terms of scope, it is important to note that we do not look at the work of lone wolf actors, hacker collectives, or Internet subcultures who use these platforms for social media manipulation, unless they have formally coordinated with cyber troop actors. Thus, we do not capture individual actors who might share the same ideologically goals or values as governments, but who do not work directly in cooperation with them. We also only focus on national initiatives. Thus, government or military coordination with regional organizations such as NATO are not included in this analysis. 9

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