2020 GLOBAL INVENTORY OF ORGANIZED SOCIAL MEDIA MANIPULATION following keywords were selected and used in combination sources and secondary literature used in this report can be for our search: bot; disinformation; fake account; fake news; found in our public Zotero database, where country-specific information warfare; military; misinformation; propaganda; sources are tagged by country name. psychological operations; psyops; social media; sock puppet; troll. Country Case Studies There are two major limitations to conducting our qualitative After completing this qualitative content analysis and content analyses: media bias and language. To help mitigate secondary literature review, research assistants synthesized bias, we used LexisNexis and the top three search engine the findings into short country case studies. These case studies providers — Google, Yahoo!, and Bing — which provided hits to provide more information about instances of computational a variety of professional, local, and amateur news sources. To propaganda we identified in the content analysis, as well as ensure that only high-quality news sources were being used to detailed information about the specific country context and build our dataset, each article was given a credibility score using media environment in which social media manipulations are a three-point scale. Articles ranked at one came from major, taking place. The case studies also provide greater details about professionally branded news organizations. Articles ranked at the kinds of actors involved, examples of cyber troop activity, as two came from smaller professional news organizations, local well as a detailed bibliography of news articles and secondary news organizations, or expert commentary and professional sources about social media manipulation in that country. blogs. Articles ranked at three came from content farms, or personal or hyper-partisan blogs. These articles were removed Expert Consultations from the sample. The last step of our research methodology — consultations with Language was a second limitation to conducting our qualitative experts — allowed us to peer review the case studies, as well as get feedback on the quality of English and local-language content analysis. For this year’s global inventory, we were able news reporting and secondary literature we found and discuss to draw upon news articles and secondary resources written additional resources and citations in alternative languages in Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Russian, with native speakers. Experts were asked to review the case and Spanish. We also worked with BBC monitoring who 1 studies drafted by research assistants, and (1) fact-check provided an additional portal for collecting and aggregating the information and data for accuracy; (2) provide additional high-quality news and information on cyber troop activity, citations to open source material; and (3) provide general as well as translation services for news articles for: Ghana, feedback on the reliability of the data. Researchers would Eritrea, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Oman, Rwanda, and Yemen. We implement feedback from their expert consultations to finalize relied on English language reporting for: Armenia, Azerbaijan, the draft of the case study, which was used as evidence to Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Croatia, Czech build this report. The final case studies can be found in a data Republic, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, supplemental published alongside this report. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Malaysia, Moldova, North Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. Secondary Literature Review After conducting a content analysis, a team of research assistants completed secondary literature reviews to provide in-depth profiles of cyber troop activity in specific country contexts. These case studies drew from the data collected in the content analysis, as well as in-depth secondary literature reviews, where case study authors searched for other highquality open source information about cyber troop activity. This involved looking for government reports, think tank papers, academic and scholarly studies, and research conducted by civil society organizations. A complete archive of the news 1 https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/ [ 7 ]