Cambodia Introduction The Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) has been ruling Cambodia for over thirty years. Over the years, media freedom has declined, and the government has taken actions towards tightening restrictions and enabling pro-government outlets to dominate the local media landscape. In May 2018, the major media outlet Phnom Penh Post was sold to a Malaysian investor known to have links to Prime Minister Hun Sen (Wiseman, 2019). That same year, in the run-up to the elections, media outlets, including the Cambodia Daily was forced to shut down, Voice of Democracy’s and Voice of America’s news and education programs were banned on FM radio stations, and Radio Free Asia’s office in Phnom Penh was forced to close (Freedom House, 2019; Wiseman, 2019), and activists and citizens in general were harassed and intimidated for their posts on social media, leading to high levels of self-censorship (Freedom House, 2019). In late 2019, the director-general of the General Department of Information and Broadcasting announced the intention to revoke licenses of media outlets considered to be spreading disinformation and to block media outlets “not officially registered with the Ministry of Information, or not using the country’s .kh Internet domain” (Wiseman, 2019). Most recently, in the context of COVID-19 pandemic, the government has been actively monitoring social media to identify people who post content related to what they label as “false rhetoric” (Turton, 2020). At the beginning of the pandemic, the Information Ministry accused forty-seven Facebook accounts and pages of purposefully spreading misinformation about the COVID-19, and as of April 2020 (Human Rights Watch, 2020b), at least thirty people had been arrested on charges of promoting “fake news” (Human Rights Watch, 2020a). An Overview of Cyber Troop Activity in Cambodia Organizational Form There is evidence of bots and fake accounts being used by politicians to boost their popularity on social media. Prime Minister Hun Sen has been accused of artificially boosting his popularity, by hiring foreigners to create fake accounts and increase the number of fans of his page (BBC News, 2016). Launched in 2015, Hun Sen’s Facebook page had almost nine million followers in 2017 and was ranked by global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller as the eighth most popular of any world leader (Paviour, 2017). In March 2016, local outlet the Phnom Penh Post reported that the majority of Hun Sen's recent likes came from foreign accounts. The single biggest groups of likes came from Indian accounts (255,692), with significant numbers also from the Philippines (98,256), Myanmar (46,368), Indonesia (46,368) and several others, according to the Post (Nass & Turton, 2016). It is suspected that these followers are not real. According to the report, companies running offshore ‘click farms’ might be behind them, in which low-paid workers create fake accounts to help bolster likes, followers and views on their clients’ social media profiles (Nass & Turton, 2016). Lawyers for the opposition leader Sam Rainsy asked Facebook for information about the account of Hun Sen, including as spending on advertisements and the purchase of likes. However, (as of May 2019) the filed case is still under examination (Freedom House, 2019) and its result might define Facebook's role in the region. 66