KAZAKHSTAN Introduction Computational propaganda takes place in the context of tight political and Internet controls in Kazakhstan. Freedom House cited Kazakhstan as one of the countries experiencing the biggest decline in Internet freedoms this year, partly a result of the political upheaval in 2019 (Freedom House, 2019). Popular unrest was triggered by the resignation of President Nursultan Nazarbayev -- after 29 years in power -- in March 2019. An election in June 2019 confirmed his successor as Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, with over 70% of the vote. During this period many social media platforms were temporarily inaccessible, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp (Freedom House, 2019). There is evidence of networks of fake accounts that promote the government online. They are commonly referred to as ‘nurbots’ (нурбот), after the ruling Nur Otan Party. Despite their prevalence, nurbots have “never gotten a lot of attention from either local or international media” (Kozhanova, 2019). Disinformation is widespread, resulting in a team of journalists launching the first factchecking organisation in Central Asia: Factcheck.kz. Their goal is to fight against unreliable information, information manipulation, and fake news. Factcheck.kz publishes in Kazakh, Russian and English, and translated articles were used for this report. Further evidence is drawn from a series of interviews with a former nurbot farm employee, released by the human rights media project The Analytical Center for Central Asia (ACCA). Expert consultations were also undertaken to confirm these findings, as in response to an ACCA article, Samat Nurtaza, one of the accused individuals of the Institute of Eurasian Integration, wrote a refutation on Facebook dismissing the article as “fake and misinformation” (ACCA, 2020b). An Overview of Cyber Troop Activity in Kazakhstan Organizational Form Media companies controlled by the Ministry of Information incorporated positive messaging and trolling within their remit as early as 2013. Some of their social media accounts were traced to IP addresses located in government buildings. This led to an increase in operational security by government actors through distributed Internet modems to obfuscate their efforts. There has been a shift towards outsourcing these capabilities, and there are now multiple organisations that allegedly run nurbot farms. The ACCA reports that the first farm appeared in response to claims about national security concerns, under Karim Masimov, the head of the National Security Committee (ACCA, 2020a). This would place the emergence of the first nurbot farm around approximately 2016-17. Previously, bot farms have been part of the Nur Otan Party, run by the youth wing of the party, Zhas Otan. Currently, it is claimed by the ACCA that there are bot farms linked to the National Security Committee, KazMedia (supervised by the president’s adviser Erlan Karin), and the Institute of Eurasian Integration. The Institute of Eurasian Integration is supervised by Samat Nurtaza and Anuar Shotbai, both reported to be close to Erlan Karin, and it is reported that around 50 remote workers are coordinated from this Institute (ACCA, 2020c). Similarly, KazMedia has around 100 employees that each manage ten accounts on different social networks. Factcheck.kz uncovered “a whole network of fake accounts that are used to promote official pages, state programmes, institutions and party initiatives” (Factcheck, 2019b). The 221