El Salvador Introduction Ending the long-term dominance of the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) parties who had been in power since 1992, in March 2019 Nayib Bukele became president of El Salvador, representing Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA). Whilst social media was at the centre of his presidential campaign, during his time in office he is using social media to directly address his citizens (Esberg, 2020) and he employs Twitter as “his official communication mechanism” (Meléndez, 2020). Nevertheless, social media is increasingly being used as a battlefield for presenting opposing narratives. Both supporters and critics of President Bukele coordinate operations to favour or criticize his leadership and policies. And Bukele himself and his administration have been accused of working with troll centres, as well as coordinating amplification campaigns and attacks against journalists and the opposition. An Overview of Cyber Troop Activity in El Salvador Organizational Form Troll or net centres have often been at the centre of manipulation operations in El Salvador. Indeed, President Bukele had previously paid a troll centre to target local media outlets (Esberg, 2020). In August 2020, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador created a commission to investigate whether Bukele’s government paid net centres to attack and harass journalists and the opposition (Castañeda, 2020). Additional evidence has linked the presidential press office to online attacks against the opposition. Since 2012 the Twitter account @_brozo attacked accounts critical to Nayib Bukele. However, when in January 2019, Twitter suspended the account, the former account @PrensaBukele deleted most of its previous tweets and changed its name account to @__Brozo__. @PrensaBukele was created in early 2015 before Bukele took office as Mayor of San Salvador and it was subsequently used during his presidential campaign. After he became president, it was the first official account of the newly created president’s press office led by Ernesto Sanabria (Rauda et al., 2020). Porfirio Chica, communications and public relations strategist and owner of the media outlet Última Hora, has worked for several political campaigns in El Salvador, such as the re-election of former general attorney Luis Martínez in 2015. For that campaign, he coordinated a propaganda network including the columnist Geovani Galeas, politician Juan José Martell, Garrid Safie, Julio Valdivieso, and Félix Ulloa, among others, to boost Martínez’s image in both traditional and social media. In the 2018 municipal campaign, this network targeted Will Salgado, former mayor of San Miguel. Fake accounts used hashtags, such as #Willyarobosuficiente and #Willrobo to coordinate a campaign attacking the candidate (Rauda et al., 2020). Porfirio Chica is known to be closed to former governments of Flores and Saca, and currently, to Bukele’s. According to Esberg (2020) he was the first person to post #QueBonitaDictadura, the main hashtag of a coordinated campaign to favour President Bukele. In July 2020, Facebook removed Facebook and Instagram accounts and pages that were linked to Ecuatorian Canada-based firm Estraterra. Although there is no further information about the 128