2020 GLOBAL INVENTORY OF ORGANIZED SOCIAL MEDIA MANIPULATION Organizational Behavior, Budgets, and Capacity Although there is limited public information about the size and operations of cyber troop teams, over the past four years we have assembled the most comprehensive evidence of how they are resourced and coordinated. Team Size and Permanency The size and permanency of teams vary from country to country. In some countries, teams emerge temporarily around elections or to shape public attitudes around other important political events. In others, cyber troops are integrated into the media and communication landscape with full-time staff working to control, censor, and shape conversations and information online. In Venezuela, for example, leaked documents in 2018 described how disinformation teams were organized following a military structure, where each person (or crew) could manage twenty-three accounts, and be part of a squad (ten people), company (fifty people) a battalion (one hundred people) or a brigade (five hundred people), which could operate as many as 11,500 accounts (Riley et al., 2018). As part of these teams, people would “sign up for Twitter and Instagram accounts at government sanctioned kiosks” and were rewarded with coupons for food and goods (Riley et al., 2018) as well as other governmental benefits (Quintero & Coscojuela, 2019). Budget and Expenditures Computational propaganda remains big business. We have documented several expenditures made by cyber troops — either through purchasing political advertisements or by signing contracts with strategic communications firms. Between January 2019 and November 2020, cyber troop actors have spent over US $10 million on Facebook advertisements, and governments have signed more than US $60 million worth of contracts with private firms. Cyber Troop Capacity By looking comparatively across the behaviours, expenditures, tools, and resources cyber troop employ, we can begin to build a larger comparative picture of the global organization of social media manipulation. National contexts are always important to consider. However, we suggest it is also worth generalizing about the experience of organized disinformation campaigns across regime types to develop a broad and comparative understanding of this phenomenon. We have begun to develop a simplistic measure to comparatively assess the capacity of cyber troop teams in relation to one another, taking into [ 17 ]