AUSTRALIA Introduction Computational propaganda in Australia originates from domestic political organisations as well as foreign actors. Social media remains popular—with 95% of Australian Internet users on Facebook and 19% on Twitter. The Reuters Institute found that 73% of Australians enlist online sources in their news consumption, while 45% rely on social media (Fisher, 2019). In this context, two important events in the past year have highlighted the influence of computational propaganda in Australia. The federal election took place on 18 May 2019, and having been in government since 2013, The Liberal-National Coalition (‘the Coalition’) won the election under Prime Minister Scott Morrison. During the campaign, there was a proliferation of disinformation spread by multiple political parties. Likewise, the bushfire crisis in January 2020 saw a surge in trolls, bots and conspiracy theorists manipulating online debates. Analysis suggested that bot and troll accounts were involved in a ‘disinformation campaign’ about the crisis (Knaus, 2020). Dubbed Australia’s ‘black summer’, this contributed to a heightened public awareness of the online manipulation of public opinion. Buzzfeed documented the spread of false and misleading theories about the bushfires, ranging from claims that the fires were started by environmentalists or Muslims, to images that misrepresented the scale of the fires (Wilson, 2020). This resulted in an increase in climate denialism on Facebook (Ryan & WIlson, 2020), as well as traditional media outlets peddling misinformation that fires are no worse than previous years (Cave, 2020). An Overview of Cyber Troop Activity in Australia Organizational Form State Actors Freedom House (2019) note that the Australian government does not manipulate online sources of information to advance its political interests. The government does act to counter foreign cyber troop activity. In response to online foreign influence attempts, in June 2018 the creation of the Electoral Integrity Assurance Task Force was announced, responsible for identifying and managing risks from cyber-attacks and electoral interference (Ziebel, 2018). The task force includes the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), the Department of Home Affairs, the Australian Cyber Security Centre, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. It investigated social media communications during the election and found eleven examples of illegal practice (Barbaschow, 2020). Australia passed several bills in 2018 to protect domestic politics from foreign influence: the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill, the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Bill and the Telecommunication and Other Legislation Amendment Bill. In March 2019, Facebook suspended a network of accounts that purported to represent political communities in Australia, but originated from North Macedonia and Kosovo (Facebook Newsroom, 2019). As a precautionary measure, Facebook temporarily banned non-Australians from purchasing political advertisements in an attempt to combat foreign interference in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election (Westbrook, 2019). Following the election, the Electoral Integrity Assurance Taskforce did not identify foreign interference. The Director-General of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), Mike Burgess, spoke at the Lowy Institute in March 2019 and detailed some of the ASD’s offensive cyber capabilities. One such capability was the ASD’s ‘covert online operators’—indicating that “some activities involve ASD operators assuming false online identities to disrupt terrorist networks” giving 14