Lebanon Introduction Lebanon is considered a partly-free country by the Freedom House report. Lebanon has been shaped by sectarian politics and feuds since before its independence from the French mandate in 1943 (Freedom House, 2019). Lebanon has extremely diverse religious demographics, with substantial followers of the Druze faith, Christians of various denominations, and Muslims of both Sunni and Shia Islam. These differences play an integral role in the country’s politics (Central Intelligence Agency, 2020). Lebanon’s divided political landscape is in turn strongly reflected in the country’s media landscape. With the combination of an absence of media regulation and the concentration of political and economic power within the hands of a small number of families, media outlets are strongly aligned with particular ethno-religious sects, political parties, and prominent individuals. Almost 80% of the most influential media outlets in the country are directly owned by political parties, members of parliament, parliamentary candidates, and even the state itself (Reporters Without Borders, 2018). These outlets represent the majority of TV viewership, print readership, and radio listenership. In the past decade this media landscape has come to be replicated in the online world, resulting in the ownership of many high-profile online news platforms by political actors (Ibid). For these reasons there is a general lack of trust in mainstream media, and social media platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp have become the primary sources of information for many Lebanese citizens (Lewis, 2019). The general state of online freedom in Lebanon remains fairly unstable and unpredictable. In January 2019, Lebanon’s Telecommunications Minister allegedly ordered the country’s telecom operators to block Grindr, a popular dating platform for the LGBT+ community. Additionally, in December 2018 the courts decided to block the Israeli-based hosting platform Wix, on the grounds that it violates the Israel Boycott Law of 1963, a move which caused financial problems for Lebanese businesses that were hosted on the platform (Freedom House, 2019). Since early 2017, the capacity for online freedom of expression began to severely deteriorate. The Lebanese Cybercrime Bureau has increasingly approached and pressured social media users to apologize and delete their posts. While most users are unharmed, other users have found themselves detained and interrogated for publishing content that criticizes the government or religious authorities in the country. In March 2019, a journalist was sentenced to three months in jail for a post he posted on Facebook that criticized the arrest of a Syrian tattoo artist. Another journalist was sentenced, in absentia, to four months in prison for a Facebook post that criticized the president (Freedom House, 2019) This year, Lebanon’s politics were impacted by three main events: (1) a series of mass civil demonstrations that erupted in October 2019, triggered by planned taxes on various goods, including online phone calls through apps like WhatsApp; (2) the August 2020 Beirut port blast that killed over 178 people, left 6,500 injured and 300,000 people homeless; and (3) the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. The demonstrations were seemingly non-sectarian, which in effect united the citizens around a shared cause and threatened those in power. Meanwhile, the Beirut Port blast left a vast number of Lebanese citizens in exceptionally vulnerable positions (World Health Organization, 2020). These recent developments have played a significant role in cyber troop activity. 239