Immigration/Xenophobic 11 content Public Health Policy 11 Fiscal Reform and Taxes 10 Strikes 8 Ministry of 8 Education/Education Policy Abortion 7 Economy/Poverty/Debt 7 Various other 7 Security/Arms/Crime 5 First Lady/Pro-Government 2 Propaganda Elections 2 Total 128 negative negative negative negative negative negative negative positive and negative negative positive endorsement negative Source: Author’s summary based on archive available at https://doblecheck.cr/. Only articles which were marked with an “X” as false were included, not items which were identified half-truths. Similarly, the project “Don’t Fall for it” started after the 2018 elections to counteract the impacts of false content that circulates on the Internet. It was developed by the influential news website crhoy.com, owned by the banker and former finance minister Leonel Baruch. The only fact-checking initiative which monitored social media during the election was La Nación’s “Don’t be Fooled” project, which started in January 2018.41 Readers were invited to submit stories to be verified by La Nación which subsequently published examples of false claims in its online edition (BBC Monitoring, 2018). Given the success of the project it continued after the election. During its first year of operation, the initiative debunked 209 items (Mora, 2019), of which 63 were circulating during the election (Hidalgo, 2019) and 51 were related to the fiscal reform (Arias Retana, 2019a). As such 54% of all false news items were related to two issues: the general election as well as the incoming government’s fiscal reform attempts (Arias Retana, 2019a). Conclusion Social media in Costa Rica has become an important strategic political campaign tool. While there is no systematic “weaponization of social media” to engineer election results, numerous political parties, trade unions and individual citizens have discovered the potential of social media for political campaigning since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the US. The deliberate spread of disinformation during and after elections has become particularly visible since 2018, when religious parties significantly consolidated their presence within Costa Rica’s political landscape. Both the PRN and the PR have frequently been linked to the spread of fake news, the publication of unrepresentative opinion polls, the recruitment of trolls, and harassment on Facebook and Twitter. The production of political propaganda in Costa Rica is still predominantly a home-grown and human activity. Neither the TSE nor private initiatives have found any sophisticated attempts at automation, or the use of professionally manipulated imaging to mislead voters. Since the 97