2020 GLOBAL INVENTORY OF ORGANIZED SOCIAL MEDIA MANIPULATION participation, and undermine oppositional parties. Over the last as overlapping ideologies or goals. We found twenty-three year we found examples of political parties and politicians using countries who worked in conjunction with civil society groups computational propaganda in countries such as Tunisia, where and fifty-one countries that worked with influencers to spread Facebook pages without direct links to candidates amplified computational propaganda. An example from 2019-2020 would disinformation and polarizing content in the lead-up to the include Indonesia’s “buzzer groups” who would volunteer to vote (Jouini, 2019; Elswah & Howard 2020). Another example work with political campaigns during the 2019 elections (Potkin includes the use by Michael Bloomberg, a candidate in the US & Da Costa, 2019). Democratic Party’s Presidential Primary. Here, Bloomberg used fake Twitter accounts for his campaign, hiring hundreds of operators to artificially amplify support (Axelrod, 2020). Private Firms One growing trend is the increasing number of private companies involved in computational propaganda. Evidence from platform take-downs of coordinated inauthentic behavior, as well as ongoing journalistic investigations, have helped identify a growing number of political communication firms involved in spreading disinformation for profit. In forty-eight countries, we found evidence of state actors working with private companies or strategic communication firms who offer computational propaganda as a service. These contracts can be highly lucrative: since 2009, we found almost US $60 million spent on contracts with private firms. It is important to remember that these amounts are only from confirmed reports: we suspect the actual amount is much higher. Between 2019-2020, examples of private firms include the Israeli-based Archimedes Group, who ran several campaigns across Africa, Latin America and South East Asia (Timberg & Room, 2019), or the Spanish company Eliminalia, who used computational propaganda to support local elections in Colombia, as well as campaigns in Ecuador and the Dominican Republic (Angel, 2019). Citizen Influencers and Civil Society One important feature of the organization of manipulation campaigns is that cyber troops often work in conjunction with civil society organizations, Internet subcultures, youth groups, hacker collectives, fringe movements, social media influencers, and volunteers who ideologically support a cause. The distinction between these groups can often be difficult to draw, especially since activities can be implicitly and explicitly sanctioned by the state. In this report, we look for evidence of formal coordination or activities that are officially sanctioned by the state or by a political party, rather than campaigns that might be implicitly sanctioned because of factors such [ 9 ] US $60 M spent by state actors on contracts with private firms for computational propaganda services