2020 GLOBAL INVENTORY OF ORGANIZED SOCIAL MEDIA MANIPULATION Introduction Social media platforms continue to play a critical role in the sharing of news, campaigning and elections, and political communication for over a billion people around the world. While these technologies have created a number of opportunities, they have also introduced new challenges as foreign influence operations, disinformation, and statesponsored trolling and harassment have undermined human rights, degraded the quality of political news in circulation, and undermined the legitimacy of democratically elected governments. From Chinese, Russian and Iranian-backed disinformation campaigns about the coronavirus (Barnes & Sanger, 2020; Molter & DiResta, 2020), to police forces in Belarus targeting high-profile activists with disinformation and smear campaigns (Freedom House, 2019) or private firms using computational propaganda to support local elections (Angel, 2019), many kinds of political actors are finding ways to exploit social networking technologies to spread propaganda online. Since 2016 we have monitored the activity of "cyber troops", which we define as government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online (Bradshaw & Howard, 2017). Over the past four years, we have examined the formal organization of cyber troops around the world, and how these actors use computational propaganda for political purposes. This has involved building an inventory of the evolving strategies, tools, and techniques of computational propaganda, such as the use of "political bots" to amplify hate speech or other forms of manipulated content, the illegal harvesting of data or micro-targeting, or deploying armies of "trolls" to suppress political activism or freedom of the press. We have also tracked the capacity and resources invested into developing these techniques to build a picture of cyber troop capabilities around the world. In this year’s report, we identify cyber troop activity in 81 countries: Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bolivia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Myanmar, Netherlands, Nigeria, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, [ 1 ]