Austria Introduction Austria has a comparatively long history of digital media manipulation, especially during election seasons when party competition becomes most intense. Austria’s media landscape has become more and more partisan in recent years, leading to an abundance of information confusing citizens and increasingly polarizing the public(Koponen & Sanomat, 2018). Since the 2017 election a right-wing conservative coalition of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) have governed Austria. Both parties engaged in underhanded campaigning strategies during the election, but it seems neither has faced any serious legal or public repercussions (Die Presse, 2019). Instead, both national and international papers are writing about the “phenomenon” of chancellor Sebastian Kurz who “brought the far-right into mainstream” (Fohringer, 2018). Freedom House (2019) states that Austria’s government has frequently been criticized for a lack of transparency, has weak party finance laws, is failing to adequately regulate lobbying, and is prevent parliament corruption. With regards of the FPÖ trying to gain control and power in Austria, the Freedom House Report also mentions that vice-chancellor and FPÖ chairman Heinz-Christian Strache said in 2017 that the Austrian Broadcast Corporation (ORF), which is partly controlled by the government, needed “optimization” of its objectives. How far Strache was willing to go to expand his own power in Austria, along with that of the FPÖ’s, became clear during the so-called “Ibiza Affair” in May 2019 that involved a videotape of Strache asking for highly controversial electoral support from a woman who claimed to be connected to a Russian oligarch (Schuetze, 2019; Spiegel Politik, 2019). As a result of the affair, Strache had to give up all his political functions (Murphy, 2019; ORF at/Agenturen, 2019), and new federal elections were held in September 2019 (tagesschau.de, 2019), with Kurz being victorious once again (Dean & Kottasová, 2019), forming a coalition with the Green Party, which has been governing since early 2020 (der Standard, 2019). An Overview of Cyber Troop Activity in Austria. Organizational Form In the past few years Austria’s Social Democrats (SPÖ) experienced one of the biggest political scandals when it became public knowledge that they had hired an advisor by the name of Tal Silberstein who created content to attack oppositional parties and candidates (Kozlowska, 2017). However, activities like these have been going on for years, and the SPÖ is by no means the only party involved (Die Presse, 2019). In 2017, at the time of the FPÖ’s rise to power, Austria’s media landscape was increasingly dominated by papers with close relations to the FPÖ such as unzensuiert.at and wochenblatt.at. These papers more or less publicly admit that they are not interest in independent journalism but want to support right-wing movements in Europe, especially parties such as the FPÖ or German AfD. Even so, the great reach of these outlets has nonetheless resulted in several politicians and citizens falling victim to online hate campaigns (Übermedien.de, 2018; Huffington Post, 2018; Winter, 2018). Again, the Ibiza Scandal shows that high-ranking politicians of the FPÖ clearly did not see any issues with these developments and have welcomed such shifts in the media landscape. 23