activity in Costa Rica since 2018. Following Bradshaw and Howard’s (2017; 2018) definition, “cyber troops” are “government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online”. The case study here examines the organizational form, strategies, and tools at the disposal of cyber troops for spreading false information online, and seeks to analyze the capacity and resources invested in online manipulation. It argues that Costa Rican cyber troops are homegrown and homemade, and that various political parties, civil society organizations and individuals have been implicated in spreading disinformation deliberately during election campaigns, promoting anti-establishment populist, homophobic, and xenophobic discourses. However, it also argues that, thus far, cyber troops in Costa Rica have lacked the level of sophistication we have seen in Brazil, Mexico, or Colombia. Facebook and Twitter have been the most prominent platforms for sharing disinformation. Human trolls are visible on both platforms, but the use of automated bots, cyborgs, hacked or stolen accounts, or the type of targeted advertising observed during the Cambridge Analytica scandal is still very limited.7 More recently, attempts by political actors to disinform have moved to the personal messaging system WhatsApp. This is alarming because it makes it much more difficult to uncover systematic political disinformation. Despite watchdogs created by the government and by private actors, as well as efforts by the TSE to stem systematic disinformation, the small size of the country, its high internet penetration and use of social media, combined with weak institutional cybersecurity systems, a low awareness of privacy risks, and widespread digital illiteracy create a fertile ground for the “professionalization” of cyber troop activity ahead of the 2022 elections. An Overview of Cyber Troop Activity in Costa Rica Organizational Form Cyber troop activity in Costa Rica is largely of domestic origin. Various politicians and political parties have been implicated in cyber troop activity. During presidential election campaigns, political parties and their presidential candidates hire national or foreign private contractors, strategists and digital marketing agencies to manage their online campaign rhetoric. Cyber troop activity became particularly visible during the 2018 election campaign but continued in fierce opposition to the incoming government’s fiscal and civil service reforms. Cyber troops have also involved civil society organizations and leaders. The analysis that follows provides key examples of how these different actors have tried to mislead Costa Rican citizens. Political Parties and Their Presidential Candidates The most visible attempts to manipulate public opinion using social media have been pursued by conservative politicians from parties which have not yet held executive power in Costa Rica: the far-right National Integration Party (PIN) and the religious-right parties called National Restauration Party (PRN) and New Republic (NR). PIN’s presidential candidate and former security minister Juan Diego Castro – an avid Facebook, Twitter and YouTube user – has been dubbed a “Trump in the Tropics” (Grosser, 2018) due to his populist discourse, media appearances, and social media attacks on the integrity of Costa Rica’s electoral process.8 The latter included sharing numerous messages, misleading photos and videos via Facebook and Twitter stating that he had pressed legal charges against the TSE, alleging that it was permitting electoral fraud (Madrigal, 2017). One 86