to put pressure on government and parliamentary factions to amend existing retirement legislation (Al-Qabas, 2019b). While it is difficult to directly link these campaigns to politicians, it appears that political actors are engaging in the propagation of social media campaigns to achieve political agendas. The Kuwaiti government has been accused by MPs of supporting inauthentic social media accounts that seek to provoke and attack other nation-states, weakening formerly relations with these states (Masr al-Arabia, 2019). MP Al-Hamidi al-Subai claimed that the government supports the actions of these inauthentic accounts (Masr al-Arabia, 2019). Subai further asserted that the person operating the Twitter account Al-Majlis, which reports on parliamentary news, is known to and protected by the interior ministry. He accused the account of inciting sedition (Masr al-Arabia, 2019). Political actors are also increasingly making use of media teams and private companies to conduct their online campaigns, leading to an increasingly professionalised computational propaganda industry within Kuwait (Al-Qabas, 2019b). Politicians will often employ media teams, which operate over 250 accounts. These accounts are used to ensure particular hashtags are on social media trending lists (Al-Qabas, 2019b). Fake social media pages run by foreigners are often employed by MPs and ministers to defame opponents (Masr al-Arabia, 2019). Finally, influencers are also actively spreading misinformation within Kuwait. Influencer Fouz al-Fahad was investigated by Kuwaiti authorities for promoting an unlicenced COVID19 test on Snapchat (Al Arabiya, 2020). Alongside these misinformation accusations, a number of Kuwaiti influencers have also been accused of operating an online money laundering scheme (MENAbytes, 2020). Table 1: Organizational Form and Prevalence of Social Media Manipulation in Kuwait Initial Government Politicians Private Contractors Civil Society Citizens & Report Agencies & Parties Organizations Influencers Evidence Evidence Evidence found Muslim Evidence found found Brotherhood and found Hezbollah Source: Authors’ evaluations based on data collected. Blank spaces indicate no evidence was found. Strategies, Tools, and Techniques As noted previously, much of the computational propaganda in Kuwait is targeted at particularly controversial political topics, such as Egyptian migrant workers. Another targeted topic is the “Bidun issue”, which involves calling on government to pardon citizen’s loans (AlRai, 2019). Reports claim that bots are used to target these issues, ensuring that particular hashtags are trending and artificially generating engagement and awareness of these issues (AlRai, 2019). There appears to be a significant amount of artificial engagement on Twitter surrounding this issue, with one identified bot account tweeting “over 3,000 tweets in just 18 days, with a rate of 166 tweets per day, i.e. about 10 tweets per hour” on the Bidun issue (AlRai, 2019). This illustrates the use of artificial amplification through hashtag targeting, one of the most commonly used strategies by Kuwait cyber troops. Bot accounts are used to amplify a hashtag focussed on, for example, defaming a political opponent or insulting a nation-state (Al-Qabas, 232