2020 GLOBAL INVENTORY OF ORGANIZED SOCIAL MEDIA MANIPULATION Organizational Form Cyber troop activity takes on many organizational forms and diverse actors are leveraging social media to shape public opinion, set political agendas, and propagate ideas. While many countries have seen an increase in computational propaganda activities on social media, attribution back to a particular actor remains difficult. In this report, we focus specifically on cyber troops — or government or political party use of social media to manipulate public opinion (see Table 1). Government Agencies Government agencies are increasingly using computational propaganda to direct public opinion. In sixty-two countries, we found evidence of a government agency using computational propaganda to shape public attitudes. This category of actors includes communication or digital ministries, military campaigns, or police force activity. This year, we also included counts for state-funded media under our government agency banner, as some states used their state-funded media organizations as a tool to spread computational propaganda both domestically and abroad. Between 2019-2020, recent examples of government-led activity include the Philippine Police who used Facebook to influence narratives about military activities against terrorism (Gleicher, 2020b), or ongoing cyber conflicts between the Government of National Accord and the Libyan National Army who have used social media to shape narratives about the ongoing civil war (Kassab & Carvin, 2019). An example of state-funded media includes the Belarussian media infrastructure, where the government controls more than six hundred news outlets, many of which show evidence of propaganda and manipulation (Bykovskyy, 2020; Freedom House, 2019). Political Parties In addition to government or military-led initiatives, we also looked at political parties using computational propaganda during elections. In sixty-one countries, we found evidence of political parties or politicians running for office who have used the tools and techniques of computational propaganda as part of their political campaigns. Indeed, social media has become a critical component of digital campaigning, and some political actors have used the reach and ubiquity of these platforms to spread disinformation, suppress political [ 8 ]