2020 GLOBAL INVENTORY OF ORGANIZED SOCIAL MEDIA MANIPULATION Strategies and Tactics a wide range of individuals. One recent and unique example Cyber troops use a variety of communication strategies. We have categorized these activities into four categories. The first type of communication strategy is the creation of disinformation or manipulated media. This includes creative so-called “fake news” websites, doctored memes, images or of trolling includes the cyber troop activity in Tajikistan. Here, the Ministry of Education and Science assigns trolling activities to teachers and university professors who will initiate coordinated campaigns to discredit opponents (Justice for Journalists, 2020). videos, or other forms of deceptive content online. This is the In addition to direct trolling attacks, sometimes cyber troops most prominent type of communication strategy, with cyber censor speech and expression through the mass-reporting troops in seventy-six countries using disinformation and other of content or accounts. Posts by activists, political dissidents forms of manipulated media as part of their campaigns. While or journalists can be reported by a coordinated network of there have been growing concerns about the use of “deep cyber troop accounts in order to game the automated systems fake” technology to spread disinformation, our 2019-2020 social media companies use to flag, demote, or take down report found few examples of this technology being used for inappropriate content. In seven countries we found evidence political deception. Rather than using deep fake technologies, of the mass-reporting of content and accounts. One example doctored images and videos are still the most important form of this phenomenon is the human networks of cyber troops in of manipulated media. For example, in the lead-up to the 2019 Pakistan, who both artificially boost political campaigns, but election in Argentina a manipulated video of the Minister also mass report tweets that oppose their agenda as spam, of Security Patricia Bullrich was edited to make her appear causing the Twitter algorithm to block that issue’s access to the intoxicated (Gardel, 2019). When we do find examples of deep trending panel (Poplzaj & Jahangir, 2019). Recently, however, fake technology, it is currently more commonly used in fake Twitter has maintained a 0% compliance rate with government account generation, where generative adversarial networks requests to take down content that would fall under cyber troop are used to create fake profile pictures (Alba, 2019; Stanford activities (Twitter Transparency Report, 2019). Twitter is not the Internet Observatory, 2020). only platform involved. Facebook and Google have also been The second type of communication strategy involves using data-driven strategies to profile and target specific segments of the population with political advertisements. We count instances of data-driven strategies that use advertisements to spread disinformation or other false narratives. For example, during the 2019 General Election in the UK, First Draft News identified that 90% of the Conservative Party’s Facebook advertisements in the early days of December 2019 promoted claims labelled as misleading by Full Fact (Reid & Dotto, 2019). This is an example of an instance that would fall under the a focus of cyber troops in Pakistan: on Facebook, Pakistan successfully restricted more than 5,700 posts between January and June 2019 (Facebook Transparency Report, 2019) and on Google more than 3,299 posts were requested to be removed between January and June 2019 (Google Transparency Report, 2019). Facebook, Twitter and Google have expressed their concern at these restrictive activities and have also recently threatened to remove their services from Pakistan in response to legislative attempts to censor digital content, but they have yet to act on this threat (Singh, 2020). scope of our report. In thirty countries, we identified instances 76 of data-driven strategies. In many cases, instances of datadriven strategies were being facilitated by private firms who would use social media platforms’ advertising infrastructure to target advertisements towards both domestic and foreign countries used disinformation and media manipulation to mislead users 59 audiences. For example, the Canadian-based firm Estraterra, which worked for political consultants in Ecuador, spent approximately US $1.38 million on Facebook ads targeting audiences in Ecuador, as well as other countries across Latin America (Gleicher, 2020a). countries use state-sponsored trolling to target political opponents, activists or journalists The third type of strategy adopted by cyber troops is the use of trolling, doxing or online harassment. In fifty-nine countries, we found evidence of trolls being used to attack political 7 countries use mass-reporting of content & accounts opponents, activists, or journalists on social media. Although trolls are often thought of as being constituted by networks of young adults and students, these teams can be comprised of [ 15 ]